Crying Out Loud (8 page)

‘Yeah,' she said. Then she thought of something, leant forward with her hands on her knees. ‘What if you could talk to someone in the police?'

‘That would help. Why?'

‘It's just – there was one of the detectives; he questioned me when I was a suspect.' She gave a bitter laugh, still hurt at the treatment she received. ‘But after that he kept in touch, let me know where they were up to. He informed me when they arrested Damien Beswick and he told me when they had a confession. It was good of him. I didn't have a family liaison officer as such but he did it anyway. He might see you.'

‘What's he called?'

‘Geoff Sinclair – he's based at Longsight. I did try him when the letter came, but he was off work.'

‘I'll try that, then?' I said.

‘Yes.' She seemed happier at the prospect than she had at me giving up. She wanted to get to the bottom of things and not be left with any doubts or ambiguity.

After she'd left I rang Greater Manchester Police and asked to be put through to Longsight; I was passed around a bit and was finally told that Detective Sinclair had retired.

When I rang Libby, she was disappointed but asked me if I could try and contact him anyway. She knew he lived in New Mills, a village up in the peaks beyond Stockport.

Luckily Sinclair had a BT phone line. That meant he was in the directory. With the plethora of telecoms providers, many subscribers are no longer listed. It isn't impossible to find people on other networks – it just takes longer.

He was home. He listened to my spiel about working on behalf of Libby Hill (I was sure that using her name would get me further than leaving it out) and I told him that both Libby and Heather Carter had received letters claiming Damien Beswick was innocent.

‘Tell her to chuck it in the bin,' he said, in a blunt Lancashire accent.

‘She won't do that, not yet anyway. Can I come and see you?'

‘Why?' He was guarded.

‘Libby wants to be certain that the conviction was sound. If I knew some of the police evidence that supported his confession—'

‘I don't know,' he said.

‘I could be there by one,' I pressed on. ‘It's been a terrible shock for her and she really appreciated how you kept her informed during the enquiry. You could help me set her mind at ease.' What's a little emotional blackmail between investigators?

‘I'll need to be done by two,' he said flatly. ‘And you'll have to park in the pub car park on Crown Street.'

Result!

I left Jamie in Abi's care and made the trip out along the A6 through the suburbs beyond Stockport. The road narrows frequently and is choked with traffic. It got easier once I forked left and climbed up past Lyme Park, scene of the famous white shirt fandango with Mr Darcy in a television adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice
. If you didn't see it think hunk with smouldering eyes and a manly chest drenched in wet white cotton. On through Disley and from there the road clung to the hillside as the valleys opened out and the peaks came into view. New Mills is famous for its textile mills and sweet factory (Swizzles, home to Refreshers, Love Hearts and Drumstick lollies) and, more recently, renowned for the innovative hydroelectricity scheme sited on an old weir.

Geoff Sinclair looked like Gollum from
The Lord of the Rings
movies – well, a middle-aged version. Bald-headed with wide cheekbones, big ears and a long, scrawny neck, bulbous startling blue eyes and rubberiness to his lips. Large hands with spidery fingers. Unlike the ghostly creature in the films, his complexion was sallow, yellow. It was hard to tell his age: his face was wrinkled but I'd have guessed fifties rather than sixties. Police can retire after twenty-five or thirty years on a pension, so if he had joined up as a young man he may only have been fifty or so now.

We didn't shake hands but he invited me in with a nod of the head. His cottage was on the outskirts of town and the living room had a broad window running across the main wall at the back, facing out on to the hills and the valley below. Nature in wide-screen. It was another breezy day and a stand of hawthorns to the left of Sinclair's garden, bent low to the hill, shivered in the wind.

‘Would you like a brew?' he offered. ‘There's a pot just made.'

I thanked him and he disappeared into the kitchen while I sat and drank in the view. As the hills rose from the valley floor, I could see where farmland gave way to the moors, the green and tawny pastures replaced by dark splashes of peat bog, swathes of purple heather and orange-coloured bracken. I made out the hulk of Kinder Scout, the area's highest peak: a gritstone plateau, a sometimes wild and treacherous place to walk. Clouds like boulders, dense and rounded, swept over the mountain. It'd be a punishing commute to work in Manchester from here but maybe the trade-off was worth it.

The tea came, hot and strong, bitter on the tongue. Just the way I like it. Aware that my time was limited, I began by showing him Chloe's letter. He read it and snorted, a plosive ‘pah' from his lips.

‘I went to see her, then I visited Damien,' I told him.

‘He still in Strangeways?'

I nodded.

‘So, what's his story?' he sounded deeply suspicious as he lifted his mug.

‘Garbled, to say the least. He says Charlie was already dead when he entered the cottage. He claims he confessed because he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms and it was the easiest way to end the interview and get some medical attention.'

‘He entered a guilty plea,' Sinclair said deliberately. He blew on his tea and took a sip.

‘Yes,' I agreed, ‘but then he told his sister he'd made it up.'

‘He's mucking you about,' he said.

‘Maybe. But if you set aside the confession and his presence at the scene, what other evidence did you have? You didn't have the weapon.'

‘Never found.' He pulled a face. ‘Beswick said he'd chucked it away – wouldn't or couldn't say where.'

‘Was it his knife?'

‘No. He said it was at the cottage, on the work surface. When Charlie came at him, Beswick grabbed it. One stab wound to the stomach. But Beswick's narrative of events matched everything at the scene. Everything,' he repeated, locking those large eyes on mine. ‘There were no loose ends, no discrepancies. He's wasting your time.'

Personally I thought the absence of the murder weapon was rather a loose end but I didn't want to aggravate him. I wasn't going to just drop it, though. ‘Did you interview him?' I asked.

‘No.' He took another sip of his tea.

I was disappointed, thinking he wouldn't have as much information if he hadn't heard it first-hand. ‘But Damien was at the cottage,' I pointed out. ‘He'd have picked up details from being there, wouldn't he, even if he hadn't been the one to attack Charlie? Like where the body was and the fact that Charlie had been stabbed?'

Sinclair's eyes, wide and glassy, like blue mints, bore into me. ‘It's possible,' he allowed. His long fingers curled round his mug.

‘How much detail did he give?' I asked. ‘He could barely remember anything when I asked him to talk me through it,' I said. ‘Surely the police would expect it to be coherent and detailed.'

‘He'd taken drugs that day, on the way to the cottage – did he tell you that?'

Annoyance flickered inside me; Sinclair noticed and gave a little nod. If Damien had been doped up, it could well affect his recollection of events.

‘What you're not taking into account,' Sinclair said, ‘is that the detectives talking to him would have been trained in advanced interview techniques. You have a suspect who says they can't remember and there are ways and means to access those memories.'

‘Like what?' I was interested professionally, although a major difference between my role and that of the police when talking to people is that I have no authority. The people I speak to can clam up, get up and walk away, refuse to let me over the threshold. I can't ‘detain' anyone for questioning.

Sinclair set down the cup and winced: an irritable, grumpy old man not wanting to explain. Nevertheless, he began to answer my question, his hands gesturing expressively as he spoke. His wrists were bony, jutting from his pullover, and I wondered if he lived alone, and if he'd let mealtimes slide in the weeks since he'd retired.

‘Take a mugging,' he began. ‘It's all a blur to the victim – didn't get a good look at the mugger and so on. But they do mention it had just started raining. Well, we take that one concrete detail and build on it: what sounds were there when it started raining? Was it cold or warm? Had anyone just passed them? Do they remember what colour coat the person was wearing?'

‘Appealing to the senses?' I saw what he meant.

‘That's what memories are made of.'

Like a smell bringing back a particular time in life, or a piece of music triggering a memory. I thought about it. There had been precious few sense memories in Damien's story when I spoke to him: ‘it was freezing' was one, the smell in the cottage another.

‘I wasn't in on those interviews,' Sinclair said. ‘Beswick's recollection was hazy at times because of the drugs, but it still fit the known facts. Fit like a glove. Now, if his new version is a load of tripe, then keeping it vague, ill-defined and sketchy is safer for him. If you're lying you keep it simple, say the minimum, so there's less to trip you up. Telling the truth you can elaborate, illustrate your story, you don't need to worry about contradicting yourself. The memories are solid. The details are there.'

I looked out to the hills while I considered what he'd said. A fierce gust of wind rattled the hawthorn and a crow landed on the dry stone wall at the bottom of the garden, its plumage dark and ragged.

‘One thing he did say was that the door was unlocked. Why would Charlie not lock up?' I said.

‘Maybe he was coming in and out, fetching things from the car. And he was expecting Libby, remember.'

‘But the lights were off: that's what drew Damien to the cottage,' I said. ‘He thought it was empty.'

Sinclair shook his head. ‘It's more likely he turned them off after.'

‘Why?'

‘It's a natural impulse, to conceal a crime. The criminal will want to hide the body, delay detection, obscure the truth.'

‘Damien said he was sick by the gate.' Another clear detail – was it a lie?

‘That's right,' Sinclair confirmed.

‘And he saw a man walking down the hill,' I said.

Sinclair frowned, creases rippling across his wide brow. ‘First I've heard of it.'

‘Someone coming down the hill as Damien was going up from the bus,' I said.

‘We'd nothing like that on house-to-house. There was no mention of that,' he said. ‘We hadn't any witnesses in the vicinity, not a soul.' Sinclair closed his eyes for a moment. I waited. ‘Did Beswick imply that this man might be the real killer?' he asked, sarcasm ripe in his tone.

‘Yes,' I admitted.

He gave a snort. ‘There you go, then. He knows we have no other suspects so he conjures someone out of thin air.'

Was that the case? Damien inventing a bogeyman in the dark – a shadowy figure who'd never come forward? Something, someone to give his retraction more credence.

‘Why was Libby a suspect?' I asked him.

‘She found the body, she'd been at the scene, she had a close relationship to the deceased. We had to eliminate her. Standard practice.'

‘But what motive would she have?' Above the slopes of Kinder, a bird was cruising on a slipstream.

‘Lover's tiff. He tells her he's going back to the wife and she loses it. Or she tells him about the baby and he wants to send her packing.' He paused. ‘She had the baby all right?'

‘Yes, a girl.'

He dipped his chin, satisfied. ‘It's always a sensitive area.' He went on: ‘Those close to the victim are key candidates for the crime. No one likes putting a person who has just lost a loved one through a bout of questioning, and it is done with great sensitivity, but it has to be done.'

‘And you never had any doubts that you got the right man?'

‘None,' he said simply.

There was a knock at the door and I got to my feet as Sinclair did. ‘Thank you. If I think of anything else, can I ring you?'

He paused, then: ‘Yes.'

At the door there was a nurse; she bore a lapel badge with her name on and the logo Macmillan Cancer Support. She smiled then looked past me to Sinclair. ‘Good afternoon, Geoff.'

I said goodbye. She stood aside to let me pass, then went in.

A host of tiny clues fell into place: the man's jaundiced colour, his lack of hair or eyebrows, his skeletal frame, his ‘retirement', the way he'd winced at one point as he set his cup down. Geoff Sinclair was battling cancer.

Why had he agreed to see me? I felt slightly guilty that I'd pushed to meet him: surely a sick person had other priorities. But then I talked myself round: wasn't I just being patronizing? Sick or not, Geoff Sinclair was a grown-up, more than capable of deciding for himself whether to respond to my request. Perhaps it was it a welcome distraction from his enforced rest. Or maybe he felt obliged, on Libby's account. Whichever, for me there had been progress, not much I grant you, but enough to feel I could usefully take things further.

EIGHT

I
picked up Jamie and paid Abi for her time. Although I had chores to do, I could take the baby with me.

Pushing her up the road to the centre of Withington, near where we live, I enjoyed the walk. The wind and rain had ebbed away, taking the clouds too and leaving a high blue sky where gulls wheeled and cried. The sun, its light suffused, warm and golden, made the colour of the leaves sing bronze and crimson, copper and nut brown. In the sycamores by the fire station, starlings thronged the branches, yattering at each other. Someone had been cutting back conifers in the graveyard by the church and the crisp scent of pine sap bit the air.