Femur was having another bad night. He couldn’t stop thinking about Trish Maguire’s thin face and brilliant eyes, or her link with Malcolm Chaze. The coincidence made him edgy. And he didn’t know how to take it. He didn’t really believe she was part of a set-up to tempt him to make a public fool of himself, but could it really be coincidence that had brought her of all people back into his working life?
He had exposed a corrupt officer last year, and even though everyone wanted the bad apples chucked out of the barrel, no one loved the chucker. It had been during that particular case when he’d met Trish Maguire for the first time. Could it just be coincidence?
That time she had had access to information that she’d withheld for so long that a man who should have lived had died. He still hadn’t forgiven her for that. But she had paid for it in the assault she’d suffered.
Thinking about that, Femur realised it was enough to explain her anxiety over her tenuous link to Malcolm Chaze. Femur had seen enough beaten women to know what the experience of being attacked in their own home did to them. It took some of them years to get over it, and a lot looked over their shoulders for the rest of their lives. Maguire’s sufferings at the hands of the psychopathic thug Femur had eventually managed to get put away for life must still be affecting her judgement.
He had no such excuse, and he had to decide what to do with the information she’d brought him. He didn’t have an unlimited budget and he couldn’t go chasing wild geese. It was tempting to file and forget the Deborah Gibbert connection. But officers who’d done that sort of thing in the past had come a cropper when the loony suggestion they’d dismissed out of hand turned out to be true. He couldn’t afford that sort of mistake at this stage in his career.
Shit, he hadn’t worried like this since his early years in CID. He must be losing it. Or maybe it was the drink. There’d been too much of that recently. He hadn’t been counting the whiskies last night, but his head and his gut, as well as his mouth, told him there’d been too many. Maybe that was all these worries were, fallout from the drink. His liver had probably woken him as it tried to mash up the alcohol and now it was sending mad thoughts through his brain. When the hangover had gone in the morning, he’d be able to think sensibly again and decide what to do about Maguire.
He tried to wrestle his bedclothes into shapes that didn’t dig into him the moment he tried to relax. One thing he didn’t have to worry about, thank God, was waking Sue with his restlessness. She’d gone to stay with some friend in Spain a week ago.
He wasn’t sure she was coming back, and he wasn’t altogether sure he minded as much as he ought. Life at home might be messier without her, but it was a damn sight easier. More peaceful. It did piss him off, though, that she’d lied about the friend. Yes, it was the lies, not her absence, he minded.
Stephanie Watson, Sue had called the friend. Femur wasn’t sure why he’d bothered to check up, but a quick call to the airline had told him there were no Stephanies on Sue’s flight at all, although there was a Stephen Watson. A few covert enquiries among the neighbours and Sue’s sister produced the
further information that the art teacher at the adult education classes Sue had been taking was called Stephen.
The two of them had run out of affection and things to talk about long ago, so what did it matter? Thank God for work. He lay on his back and stared up at the dark ceiling.
But it was work that had brought sodding Trish Maguire back into his life, threatening to disturb the calm, orderly investigation he’d planned. He and his team had to probe Chaze’s personal life for any clues to the motive for his death and the identity of his killer, and the person who’d taken out the contract.
Femur had decided that the widow would be interviewed first, then Chaze’s immediate staff and close friends, including any current girlfriends they might turn up and any cuckolded husbands. The team would then go on to more distant relations and less intimate friends. If nothing came out of those interviews they’d go back and back through all his contacts, all his lovers, and all the ramifications of an apparently colourful past. They’d spread their inquiries in ever-widening ripples from the centre of the victim’s life until they’d found their answers or exhausted every possible lead.
It was the latter possibility that he expected. Most murders in Britain might be domestic, but not the ones where the victim was shot in the head by a man on a motorbike. That sounded like a contract, and a contract nearly always meant drugs, or maybe terrorism.
Unfortunately Femur and his team would not be looking into either. While the team in Incident Room I were tackling the physical evidence found at the scene and the house-to-house inquiries, Incident Room II would be digging into the victim’s political background. Lucky buggers.
Chaze had been in the House of Commons for years and, even though he’d never been a minister, he’d served on various ‘sensitive’ select committees. Everything he’d said
then, everything he’d heard, and every secret document he’d seen would have to be checked for possible links to the killing. He’d had some input in the Balkans, apparently, some with the new MI5 organised-crime department, and some with counter-terrorism. Any of them could have led to his death.
But that investigation was the plum assignment and Femur didn’t get those any more. He couldn’t blame Maguire for that. She was OK, really. It wasn’t her fault he’d been sidelined, even if she had been involved in the case that had caused all the problems.
He looked at the clock. It was already five. There didn’t seem any point lying in bed any more. In his present state of mind, tossing and turning wasn’t going to do him much good. Specially not tossing, he told himself, with an attempt at gallows humour. So he got up and cooked himself some eggy bread and a large mug of tea.
It was so hot, even though it was still early, that he took his breakfast out into the garden and stared glumly at the unmown grass and the roses that needed dead-heading. If Sue were here, she’d have had him out with the mower and the secateurs long ago.
Uncomfortable, irritable, more depressed than he should’ve been, he locked up the house and headed back to the incident room determined to talk to the officers who’d investigated Deborah Gibbert’s case. With luck they’d be able to knock this wild goose on the head, then he’d be free to grill Chaze’s widow, who, according to the officers who’d seen her yesterday, wasn’t grieving half as much as she should. Bloody women.
‘If you ask me,’ DCI Ben Hatchett from Norfolk said, almost spitting down the phone a couple of hours later, ‘this TV programme about the Gibbert case is so much horse-shit. We’ve already heard about it and we’re not worried. Not at all.’
Femur sat more comfortably in his chair.
‘Your MP’s death can’t have anything to do with it.’
‘Right. Though, as I see it,’ Femur said, determined to banish the ghost of Trish Maguire’s suspicion completely, ‘you didn’t have any incontrovertible evidence against Gibbert, did you? Means? Maybe. Opportunity? Certainly. But no evidence.’
‘Except the bag she’d used – in other words, a lot more than other forces have had in cases they’ve won. For Christ’s sake, Femur! There were Gibbert’s prints on the outside and no one else’s, her father’s saliva inside. It’s as near incontrovertible as you’re likely to get in this kind of killing.’
‘But what about this story of the daughter picking up his teeth with the bag?’
‘Bollocks to that. She’s been watching too many cop shows on telly.’
‘Although, if she’d been thinking like that, wouldn’t she have got rid of the bag altogether? It wouldn’t have been that difficult in the middle of the country. There were probably goats or pigs in the farm next door. They eat anything, don’t they?’
‘Whose side are you on, Femur?’ asked the Norfolk officer indignantly.
‘Yours,’ Femur answered at once. ‘Ours, I mean. But I have to get it clear. You’re sure, are you, that he couldn’t have done it himself?’
‘And taken the bag off once he was dead, you mean?’ Sarcasm dripped from his voice.
‘Right. Of course. Then why didn’t she leave it there?’
‘Because, according to all reports, she’s not over-bright. You should have heard her sister on the subject! I’ll send you copies of the SOCO reports and the pathologist’s if that’ll stop this nonsense,’ Hatchett offered.
‘That would be good. Thanks.’
Femur put down the phone, rubbing his chin. Odd how satisfying that could be, feeling the odd bristle where his shaving hadn’t been up to scratch against the softness of the inside of his hand. Up and down; up and down; soft then rasping. Satisfying.
‘You OK, Guv?’
He stopped feeling his bristles and focused on Caroline Lyalt’s bright face. His scowl softened. ‘At least I wasn’t looking for hairs on the palms of my hands,’ he said, making her blink. ‘You look bright and breezy this morning.’
‘I am. Even though I’m not hopeful that we’ll crack this one.’
‘Me neither.’
‘But I have been reading Trish Maguire’s statement. Guv, you don’t think …’
He shook his head. ‘No. But I think we will have to follow it up; both the Gibbert connection and the row Maguire overheard Chaze having with his wife. I could have done without her intervention, you know, Cally.’
‘There’s a secretary, Sally Hatfield,’ she said casually. ‘DC Pepper saw her yesterday. I’ve been reading the statement she gave him, and she lists Maguire as the last visitor she admitted to the house before she went home on the night Chaze died. We’d have had to talk to Trish Maguire anyway, Guv.’
His head was still thumping and, despite the breakfast, and the toothpaste, his mouth felt like shit. He knew Caroline was right about Maguire, but he wasn’t going to say so.
‘Was Chaze bonking the secretary? If you believe the tabloids, all MPs are at it all the time.’
Caroline grinned. ‘Not this one. At least not yet. I doubt if it would have taken long, if he was up for it: she definitely was. But, as far as I can tell, things hadn’t gone much further than silent adoration.’ She hesitated, seemed to be assessing how much he could take, then added, ‘Unlike with Deborah
Gibbert in the days when they were both working at London University.’
Femur’s hands were cradling his aching head before he’d realised he’d moved. ‘Don’t do this to me, Cally. I thought the only connection between them was that he’d taken up her case – presumably to grab publicity for himself before the next election.’
‘No. There’s more. They’re old friends. Didn’t you get to that bit in Maguire’s statement?’
‘I told her to give it to Steve Owler. I was going to read it when there was time this morning. I thought I’d got all the salient bits in my head.’
‘According to Maguire, it was Chaze’s old affair with Gibbert that made him sure she’s innocent. That’s why he got involved in the first place.’ Now there was compassion in her face; compassion of a kind he’d only ever seen directed at victims and their families. He must sort himself out. He couldn’t go round being pitied, even by a woman as sensible as Sergeant Caroline Lyalt.
‘Could you ever kill one of your parents?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Like Deborah Gibbert? No, Guv.’
‘Not even if they were in agony the doctor couldn’t do anything about?’
‘No. I’m too much of a wimp probably.’
‘And too law-abiding,’ he said, with a faint smile.
‘I’m not sure about that. I hope so.’
‘So do I.’
‘But, Guv, begging to be put out of his misery can’t have applied to Gibbert’s father.’
So, he thought, you’ve been reading it up, have you? Then there must have been something in Trish Maguire’s statement that made you suspicious, too. Bugger it.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’d have asked the other sister. Everyone’s clear that he didn’t like Deborah. You’d really have to trust and love someone you asked to bump you off.’
‘You could be right,’ Femur said. ‘Now, what have you got for me about the private life of Malcolm Chaze, MP? Which, after all, is our only investigation. He must have pissed off someone.’
‘Loads of people,’ Caroline said, giving him a typed list of all the most likely names her officers had turned up so far.
Femur read it, muttering as he thought of all the big drug-importers he should’ve been allowed to check out. At the end, he looked up, feeling marginally more intelligent and in control. ‘Get regular briefing reports from the other two incident rooms, will you? Check them for any names that match ours. That way none of us will waste manpower on crossed wires or dead ends, and we won’t do a Yorkshire Ripper and miss the obvious.’
‘It’s under control, Guv.’ Caroline checked the notes in her hand. ‘First reports from ballistics suggest there’s nothing special about the bullet, which is a pain. Hairs and fibres haven’t produced anything yet, but it’s early days and they’ve got lots to work on. IR One’s pursuing the bike’s origins, but haven’t come up with anything yet. It’s a bog-standard model, sold in the thousands, plenty on the second-hand market, plenty nicked every week.’
‘That’s helpful.’
‘The house-to-house hasn’t produced anything either, and they’re collecting the CCTV footage in wider and wider circles as they follow the bike through London. So far they’ve lost it somewhere over Vauxhall Bridge. Fewer cameras on that side of the river, you see.’
‘So, nothing hard yet?’
‘Nothing. Don’t fret, Guv, the other teams haven’t got any further than us.’
Her eyes were full of pity again. He’d have to break her of the habit soon or he might give in to it. ‘So you’ve got it all under control, have you? I might as well sit on my arse for the whole investigation, Sergeant, while you run it,’ he said, ashamed of the sarcasm even as it emerged from his mouth, but not quite ashamed enough to put a cork in it.