Cobweb (15 page)

I sat down again.

‘They're mine. I helped butcher a deer, shoved 'em there and forgot about 'em.'

‘When was this?'

‘Last week.'

‘Where was it shot?'

‘On an estate on the other side of the forest. I was with some blokes. We gutted and skinned it and brought it back in someone's van. I got blood all over meself so I chucked my gear out of sight until I could wash it. I forgot, that's all.'

‘That stuff had been there for longer than a week.'

‘Well, perhaps it was the week before then.'

‘You're a liar.' Then, without warning, Patrick's hand shot out to grab Smith by the front of his dirty sweater, yanking him close. ‘Those garments had been there for weeks and weeks and d'you know? – in my trade you get to know the smell of death as well as recognizing filthy little liars. Not just animal death either: the smell of murder. You must have had run-ins with DCI Derek Harmsworth in your criminal career. I think you were involved in killing him.' He flung the man back into his seat.

Smith, whose face had gone a strange putty colour beneath the grime, had dropped his cigarette and, eyeing Patrick all the while, slowly bent down to retrieve it. ‘No,' he whispered. ‘You're just guessing – trying to frame me.'

Speaking more quietly, Patrick said, ‘You've only got until forensic testing proves that the blood on those clothes – and there's quite a lot of it – is human. This will happen within the next couple of hours. Tell the truth.' He gave his partly smoked cigarette a distasteful look and stubbed it out on a tin lid that passed for an ashtray.

‘You and who else?' I said to Smith, breaking the silence. ‘Who did you help push the car through the gap in the railings?'

Smith gaped at me and then stammered, ‘You – you can't know about …' His mouth clamped shut.

‘You're terrified of him, aren't you?' I went on. ‘They're probably his clothes that he told you to get rid of and you've been meaning to burn them but it's been too wet.' All this was pure conjecture, straight off the top of my head, but Smith did not possess the kind of brain to organize a crime that must have had some complexity.

Eyes closed, he sat there, shaking his head as though he wished the whole world would go away.

‘He'll let you take the rap,' I continued, hoping I sounded sympathetic. ‘There he'll be, sitting at home, reading about the case in the papers and laughing all over his face. “I always knew he was a fool,” he'll say to himself. “I made sure I lumbered him with my clothes.”'

The silence seemed to go on for ever and then Smith whispered, ‘I want a solicitor. I'm not saying another word until I've got one.'

I persevered. ‘But you didn't actually kill the chief inspector yourself, did you?
He
did.'

Very slowly, Smith nodded. ‘Yes,' he grunted.

‘So you're going to get it all off your chest and make a statement?'

Again, he answered in the affirmative.

‘I must tell you that if you change your mind as soon as we've gone we'll be recalled and have to go right back to square one.'

Smith did swear at me then, in effect saying that he bet I nagged my old man to death too.

As our code of practice demanded, we handed him over to the permanent staff at Woodhill, not at all sure about the likelihood of any useful outcome, and then went back to our digs.

O
ne and a half hours later we were recalled to Woodhill police station. A sense of foreboding – nothing to do with half a dozen or so binge-stricken teenage girls screaming and/or lying prone on the floor of the reception area – hit me as soon as we walked in. Erin Melrose, who appeared to have been waiting for us, came forward.

‘They're all in the Super's office,' she said in an undertone before shying like a horse as someone vomited near her.

‘What's happened?' I asked, likewise getting out of range.

She hesitated, then said, ‘I'm not supposed to say a word, but it's only fair to tell you that Daniel Smith's hanged himself.'

With Knightly were Michael Greenway, a middle-aged woman by the name of Greta Cunningham, who was with Greenway in a capacity that was not made clear, a man I only knew as Keith, a custody officer, and, oddly, DI Hicks. I did not find it surprising that the latter had a superior smirk on his face that he was, however, being careful only to point in our direction.

Knightly gave us the news.

‘This is appalling,' Patrick said before anyone else could speak. ‘How did he do it?'

‘With his belt,' Knightly answered.

‘How, exactly?'

‘Put the end through the buckle to make a loop. Then he must have stood on the bunk, tied the end to an overhead pipe that serves the toilet and then stepped off.'

‘I thought belts and shoelaces were removed from suspects before they were locked up.'

‘Apparently his trousers kept falling down and as his brief was due here at any minute it was given back to him. It's not as though he was thought to be a suicide risk, for God's sake! And I'll ask the questions, if you don't mind!' Knightly went on, now shouting. ‘What did you do to him? I did ask you to question him before he was formally interviewed but not to lean on him that hard.'

‘All rather irregular, surely,' Greenway protested.

Knightly said, ‘Look, if I stuck to all the rules and regulations for every smallest misdemeanour that takes place on this patch, I'd never get home at night. Smith was a complete drop-out. He'd been in trouble with the law since he was five years old. God knows what was going through the man's mind – or what passed for one in his case – when he topped himself. All I know is that as a result of one of your lot pasting hell out of him the bugger's now dead!'

‘No,' I said. ‘Patrick didn't do anything of the kind.'

Grandiosely, to the room at large, Hicks said, ‘I'm not surprised: the man has a reputation for violence and losing his temper.'

Greenway rounded on him. ‘Who asked you?' he bellowed. ‘Why are you here, for that matter? I thought you were supposed to be working on the Giddings case. Sod off!'

‘You're SOCA – you can't order me around,' Hicks retorted.

‘No, but that doesn't mean I have to be within the same square mile as someone who tried to stitch up one of my subordinates!'

I have heavily censored that last comment.

Hicks went.

Greenway met Knightly's questioning gaze. ‘I suggest you don't concern yourself with the matter, Superintendent. I shall be reporting to
his
boss.'

Although rejoicing, I thought it best to behave as though these exchanges had not taken place and carried on with what I had been about to say. ‘Although we no longer work for MI5, Patrick and I still behave professionally – which is why, in such situations, I always utilize the small tape recorder that I never quite got round to handing back. It was switched on in my bag when the Superintendent asked Patrick to question Smith and was also functioning through the entire interview with him. I deposited the tape with the sergeant on the desk as we left the building, asking him to put it somewhere safe. While I realize that it couldn't be presented in court as evidence, it at least helps to sort out the blame game and means we can begin to work together on this.'

Erin Melrose then knocked and entered with a report from the path lab. The blood on the clothing that I had found was human; DNA testing would take longer.

The tape was brought, I produced my little spies' recorder and we all listened to it, Knightly wriggling in quite gorgeous fashion and everyone else being very careful with their faces when his voice came over loud and clear telling Patrick that it did not matter if Smith met with a couple of small ‘accidents'. Erin had stayed in the room, no one having asked her to leave, and was standing rather touchingly in Patrick's lee. For protection, I wondered, Knightly having bullied her too? If Greenway had told her about the libellous, if not downright disgraceful, photograph, she might feel a need for the victims of this to stick together.

‘He really was about to cough, then,' Greenway said into the silence that followed the switching-off of the machine.

Patrick said, ‘I wish to make a formal request for the exhumation and a second post mortem on Detective Chief Inspector Derek Harmsworth. His wife has given her verbal permission.'

‘We don't know it's Harmsworth's blood,' Knightly said.

At least two of those present rolled their eyes heavenwards and it was left to me to state the obvious. ‘We won't until we have a sample of his DNA with which to compare it. It's highly unlikely after all this time that Mrs Harmsworth will have things like his unwashed clothing or brushes and combs.'

‘No,' he agreed a little sheepishly. ‘I get your point. All right, yes. It's got to be done.'

I felt that other things ought to be discussed. ‘And Smith?' I said. ‘Did he commit suicide because he was about to confess to being an accessory to murder? Was he such a sensitive soul he would feel there was no other honourable way out? Was he so disgusted with himself that he could no longer face looking at his own reflection in the mirror? Or was he strung up by someone on the orders of the actual murderer who managed to get hold of the key to his cell?'

Everyone was looking at me, their eyes rather round.

‘Murdered
here
?' said Greta Cunningham, making her debut in the proceedings. ‘You're mad!'

‘Ingrid, that's a truly staggering thought,' Greenway said. And to Knightly: ‘Is the body still in situ?'

The Super was away with the birds. ‘Er – er – yes, still in the cell, I think. Yes, that's right. He was taken down, of course. In an effort to revive him. And – er – obviously, a doctor saw him and signed the death certificate. But there'll have to be a PM.'

‘I suggest you get a pathologist and a Scenes of Crime bod in there – fast.'

‘When was the last time a suspect in custody was murdered?' said Cunningham. ‘Isn't their safety and that of the general public paramount?' She was still looking at me, askance. I had really ruined what was left of her day.

‘I suggest we take a look at him,' Greenway said, acknowledging the question with a brief nod. Then he said, ‘You're the IT wizard, Greta – why don't you go and look it up on the Internet?'

‘It would be preferable to looking at a corpse,' the woman said stonily. ‘Besides, that isn't what I'm here for.'

‘Plenty of computers in the general office,' Knightly said helpfully. ‘Erin, perhaps you'd show Miss Cunningham the way.'

We all prepared to leave the room, Greenway taking the deep breath of a man now unfettered from bureaucracy as he took from his document case a notebook and pen. I never saw the wizard again – why did I think that Greenway had been positively yearning to say ‘wonkess'? – but Erin quietly reappeared a few minutes later as we entered the cell where Daniel Smith had died.

He had been laid out neatly on the bunk, covered by the thin official-issue blanket. Greenway twitched the top of it aside.

‘I take it no one heard anything at the time it was reckoned to have happened,' Patrick said as we all stared down into the suffused, distorted face.

‘We've been inundated since quite early on this evening and it's been very noisy,' Knightly said defensively. ‘Young drunks mostly, brought in for their own good. The result of two lunch-time hen parties, I've been given to understand.'

‘No bruising on the face,' Greenway said musingly. Then, to the Super, ‘He's been moved already and the whole area well and truly contaminated. Can we take a look at his hands?'

With no objection forthcoming the blanket was taken right off.

The knuckles of Smith's right hand were grazed and there was heavy bruising on both bare forearms.

‘He took a swing at someone,' Patrick said, ‘and clouted his hand on something solid like a wall when they ducked. Didn't he attack a constable when he was first brought in?'

‘Find out who it was,' Knightly said to Erin, having noticed her presence.

‘Peter Mason, sir,' she said. ‘I was there. But Smith didn't hit himself on anything other than Peter's shoulder. He was restrained and then handcuffed before he could do anything else.'

Patrick said, ‘Restrained with sufficient force to bruise his arms like that?'

She shook her head. ‘No.'

‘Look, I know all about loyalty to chums, but please answer honestly – we might have a murder inquiry here.'

‘It's the absolute truth, sir. Mason got him in a headlock while I cuffed him.'

Patrick was looking more closely at the body. ‘This livid mark just beneath his left ear can't have been caused by the belt, surely.' He stood upright. ‘I think he was struck by the edge of someone's hand. I take it the poor sod's neck wasn't broken. So he must have been slowly strangled to death.'

The implications seemed to have just hit Knightly, who had gone very pale. ‘We'd better get someone out to this caravan where he lived,' he mumbled.

‘Does this unfortunate man's death open a can of worms, or is it new evidence?' Greenway murmured. He had accompanied us as we left the building, cleaners still busy with buckets and mops. He wrinkled his nose at the smell. ‘You know, when I started as a trooper in the cavalry, we didn't make complete idiots of ourselves with booze like this. Drunk yes, but …' He gestured at the state of affairs speechlessly.

‘I think the answer to your question might be both,' Patrick said. ‘But the real answers will come after Harmsworth's exhumation.'

‘How are you getting on with checking the names on that list?'

‘Two are in other forces' areas and I've requested a check be made, one was stated to be of no fixed address and we haven't traced him yet, another's back in prison, another's address has ceased to exist and the final two were out when we called. Not very successful so far, I'm afraid.'