Blind Alley (28 page)

Minutes went by like this. Both at a stand-off. Brady had already decided he could spend all day eyeballing Gates until he got the apology and explanation he deserved. And he wanted Gates on his hands and knees when he said it.

It was Gates who finally broke the silence.

‘I take it you’ve heard, then?’

It was clearly a rhetorical question given the fact that Brady had just barged into Gates’s office without knocking. His secretary had done her best to prevent him from walking in unannounced. But her best had not been good enough. Brady had simply ignored her pleas and protestations and thrown open Gates’s door.

Brady just looked at Gates. The anger in his eyes spoke louder than words.

Gates slowly nodded. ‘I had no choice, Jack,’ he said.

His words hung heavy in the air. Brady refused to accept them.

‘For Chrissakes! Your job was on the bloody line! That’s why I didn’t call you back to the station when all this erupted. I had Henry Sanderson and his Goddamn solicitor baying for your blood. If I hadn’t managed to calm the situation down your name would have been plastered all over the news this morning. You know what you would have been waking up to this fine Monday morning? Eh? Not hearing second-hand from someone at the station that your suspect has been released without your knowledge. Christ no! You would have woken up to the Goddamn press camped outside your house and your suspension letter in the post.’

Brady stood perfectly still as he absorbed what Gates was saying. He still did not trust himself to talk. But the questioning look in his eyes was enough for Gates to continue.

‘Lee Harris was released late last night on my orders, Jack. Mine. And I had no choice. We had nothing on him. Or should I say,
you
had nothing on him. Why the hell the Custody Officer granted you another twenty-four hours is beyond me. But I’ll be having a word with him when he comes in later. You interviewed the girlfriend, I take it?’

Brady stiffly nodded.

‘Well you know better than anyone that she provided Harris with an alibi for every night in question. And during the rapist’s first attack, he was in Paris for the weekend. I mean, what more did you want?’

‘I brought all this information to you, yesterday, sir,’ Brady stated. His voice was heavy and thick with a sudden Geordie inflection. ‘You were perfectly happy for me to hold him overnight and then question him in the morning about the footage of his car.’

‘Yes, you did. But you fed me what you wanted. At no point did you let me know the full extent of it. I agreed to the suspect remaining in custody because you persuaded me he could be a threat to the public if we released him. That he could be protecting whoever was using his car on that night. Now I understand that you wanted to present the CCTV evidence to him this morning and ask him about it. But Harry Sanderson and his solicitor saved you the trouble. They actually brought the driver in person last night to end this fiasco. She gave a statement, which you can read when you’re done. But it’s solid. She works for East Central and borrowed Lee Harris’ car because hers had broken down and he’d called in sick for the night. Very generous offer when you think about it. Hazel Edwards, fifty-two-year-old grandmother of two, needs the cash from her shift but her car’s broken. So Lee Harris steps in to help. As Harry Sanderson had pointed out to me: “Hardly the behaviour of a serial rapist, is it?”’ Gates stared hard at Brady. ‘And before you get any ideas, Hazel Edwards is clean. She has a couple of prior convictions for shop-lifting. But that was over thirty years ago. So don’t even think about her as a suspect or as an accomplice.’

Brady didn’t comment.

‘Even Harris’ trip to London and back on Saturday night has been verified. Gareth Rochdale happens to be Sanderson’s business associate. He actually asked Harris to chauffeur Rochdale to Heathrow.’ Gates looked at Brady. ‘Christ, Jack! What more do you want?’

He stood absolutely still with his hands clenched tight by his sides. Maybe it was just the cynic in Brady but he had immediately picked up on the fact that Harris had lent his car out. Brady was about to ask whether he could have planned something and was using this Hazel Edwards as a cover-up but then the Paris trip foiled him. It didn’t make any sense. There was something about Lee Harris that made him uneasy. Did that make him a serial rapist? That was another question entirely.

‘Did this Hazel Edwards say that she stopped the victim?’

‘She couldn’t remember. She said that she’s stopped countless young girls walking home alone late after having drunk a skinful in Whitley. She says she pulls over and offers them a ride. Rather they got in the car with a woman than some bloke tries to pick them up.’

‘So she’s not sure that she was the one driving the silver Passat saloon on the CCTV footage? She was shown that?’ Brady asked.

‘Of course she was bloody shown it. I dealt with it personally. Myself and DI Adamson sorted this mess out.’

Brady stared at Gates, trying to control the anger coursing through his veins.

DI Adamson was Brady’s nemesis. It was a well-known fact around the station. Adamson couldn’t stand Brady because he flouted the rules to get the job done. Whereas Adamson played everything by the book – Gates’s book. Adamson had belonged to North Shields CID until he got promoted into Jimmy Matthews’ job as Detective Inspector at Whitley Bay. Adamson was Gates’s protégé; his blue-eyed boy. He could do no wrong – unlike Brady. Overall Adamson reminded Brady of a politician. In other words, he couldn’t be trusted.

It appeared as if Gates had everything wrapped up. So why didn’t Brady accept it?

‘So, did she recognise the footage?’ Brady asked, making an attempt to keep his voice steady.

‘I already told you – no. She said that would have been just a typical night for her.’

‘So why did Winters describe the taxi driver as male then, sir?’ Brady persisted.

‘I don’t bloody know and at this point I don’t bloody care! She was very drunk. She has admitted that herself. Even her friends said she could barely stand up. So I imagine all that happened was Chloe Winters simply assumed the driver was male. Most people assume that taxi drivers in the North-East are male.’

Brady didn’t pass comment.

Gates could see from the look in Brady’s eye he was looking for trouble.

‘Let it go, Jack!’

Brady did not back down.

‘I mean it, let it go. Be grateful that they haven’t lodged a complaint against you. Sanderson’s solicitor was talking about suing for wrongful arrest. Luckily, I managed to calm things down.’

Brady kept quiet. There was nothing more to say.

‘A serious assault came in last night. I want you and Conrad to have a look into it,’ Gates instructed.

‘What about the rape investigation?’

‘You’re still working on it. Albeit by the skin of your teeth after this weekend. Two suspects dragged in and then released, one after the other. Doesn’t look good, Jack, does it? Makes the police look incompetent. In particular, it makes my Area Command look incompetent. Get your act together, all right? And in the meantime look into that assault. Maybe some distance from this case will do you some good.’

With that, Gates checked his watch and picked up his phone.

‘If that’s all?’

Dismissed, Brady turned and left, not quite sure how it had switched from him wanting an apology from Gates, to Gates demanding that Brady apologise for just doing his job.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Brady was sitting in his office trying to get his head around what had just happened. He had Hazel Edwards’s statement in front of him. It was enough. But not good enough. She had been vague – too vague – about whether she had seen the victim or not. Even after she had watched the CCTV footage. Brady was surprised that this hadn’t jogged her memory, but apparently not.

He sat back in his chair and slowly breathed out. Maybe Gates was right. He was too close to the investigation. He had worked on it for too long. There was no end in sight. This weekend Brady had believed he’d be able to close the case. But no.

Brady was waiting for Conrad. He’d had a look at the report filed on the assault. It had happened in the early hours of the morning in a back alley behind Linden Terrace. Conveniently, a location without CCTV cameras. The victim had been found at around 6:00 a.m. by a dog walker. Brady looked at the photograph of the victim’s injuries. To say he was in a bad way was putting it mildly. The attack was so violent that Brady could make out prints from the sole of a boot on the victim’s face. Or what was left of his face. His skull had taken most of the kicks. It had split open in two places from the force of the blows.

Brady pushed his hair back from his face as he stared at the brutal images in front of him. This was Whitley Bay at the weekend. Sunday nights were the worst. The police spent most of Monday cleaning up after the louts who’d been drinking non-stop from Friday night and had found themselves banged up in a holding cell charged with glassing someone for no particular reason. It wasn’t just men who were being arrested for these drunken assaults, disturbingly women were as well – regardless of age. It was a culture that Brady did not understand. Nor did he want to.

He closed the file in front of him. The last thing he wanted to do was work some ‘rubbish’ case, which in all probability was going to end up being a murder investigation given the critical state of the victim.

Brady knew him. His wallet had been left with his driver’s licence and bank cards inside his jeans pocket. His name was Eddie Jones. A small-time drug dealer and thug. He’d been banged up more times than Brady could remember but he was a hardcore recidivist and as Jones had often said: ‘Old habits die hard.’ Every time he’d been booked for dealing or possessing, he would entertain the police with that line.

Brady thought bitterly about Jones’ condition. It was ironic. The last thing he would ever snort had been his own brains back up his nose. Jones had either pissed off another dealer or had short-changed a client. Either way he had enough enemies to fill Newcastle United’s St James’ Park stadium. Gates was wasting Brady’s time. Pissing him off for the sake of it. He already felt like shit without having to follow dead leads on a victim that most of the coppers in North Tyneside saw as a problem. Because that was what Jones had become: a major headache. Rumour had it that he’d been dealing at three high schools in the area. Easy money from easy pickings. Get them young and you have them for life. Brady hated the whole drug scene. It made him sick to the stomach. But most of all, he hated the drug dealers. So why the fuck had Gates thrown this at his door? Punishment? A reminder of who was boss?

He had already swallowed his pride and updated his demoralised team with the news that the suspect had been released without charge. Amelia had said she wasn’t surprised considering the weight of his alibis. It did little to help the situation.

Brady had left them to lick their wounds. There was nothing else they could do for the time being.

He looked at his mobile. It was on silent but it was flashing red. He checked what had come through. It was an email from an unknown address. The title was ‘YouTube Murderer’. The fact that it had been sent to his personal email address, not his work account, made him believe it was some scam. He opened the email. There was a short message, ‘From a concerned friend.’ And a web link.

Brady clicked on it. Ordinarily he would have ignored it, deleting it as spam. But something made him do the exact opposite. It was this decision that would change Brady’s life – for the worse.

He watched curiously as the link took him to YouTube, unaware what was about to follow. A film entitled ‘YouTube Murderer’ started playing. Brady assumed it had been taken on someone’s mobile phone. It had been filmed at night, which made it initially difficult to make out. But it didn’t take too long before Brady realised what was happening.

‘Shit!’ he muttered, not believing what he was seeing.

Brady felt sick. He watched in horror as the film continued.

But it was the last shot that threw him.

What the fuck?

Still holding onto his phone he got up and ran to his door. He yanked it open.

‘Conrad? Conrad, where the fuck are you?’ he shouted.

Brady had forwarded the email on to Jed to see if he could trace it. And so he could check the authenticity of the film. Not that Brady was disputing that it was real. They had Eddie Jones lying in intensive care with half his brains stamped into the back alley behind Linden Terrace. Someone had considerately filmed the victim being beaten until he lost consciousness. Then they’d uploaded it onto YouTube at 3:04 a.m. Eddie Jones at that time had still been waiting to be found. Currently, the police were trying to get the film taken down. But to date it’d had over a million hits worldwide. It had spread like a virus and there seemed to be nothing they could do to stop it. People were uploading it as a link on their Facebook accounts. It was like a domino effect: as it got taken down from one social network it got uploaded onto another.

It just confirmed in Brady’s mind that people were sick bastards. It never failed to surprise him how far they would go to get their kicks.

‘Tell me again?’ Gates instructed.

‘The assailant is Jake Munroe, sir,’ Brady answered.