Everyone Lies (31 page)

A few of them smiled; all of them looked eager to make a start.

‘Ask the girls if he ever let slip what subject he taught – we could cross-check it against school staff lists. Or did he drop a name – maybe a pupil, or a member of staff who was giving him a hard time. If he complained about traffic on the way over to the salon, did he name a particular road? Anything that could help us narrow the field.’

She sought out one of the admin staff. ‘Contact the CRB, see if there’s a Trevor on their list.’ Since 2002, anyone who applied for a job in schools had to go through a Criminal Records Bureau check; the rules applied only to new applications – so if Trevor had been in post for a while, he wouldn’t be listed, but it was still worth a look. The meeting broke up a few minutes later. On her way to talk to George Howard, she paused to speak to DC Moran who by now was inching towards her desk with one hand shielding her eyes.

‘Ella, what on earth are you doing here? You should be at home.’

‘I’m fine, Boss.’

‘You look terrible.’ She resisted an impulse to seize the constable’s arm and lead her to a chair.

‘It’s just the after-effects. They washed all the nasty stuff out with baby shampoo at the hospital – said I’d be right as rain in a few hours.’

‘Okay. Take a few hours off, come back when you’re fit.’

Her chin came up, but when she tried to look Simms in the eye, she squinted and blinked as if she was looking straight into the sun. She lowered her voice. ‘Boss, it was me who found the lead that took us to Francine’s.’

‘Yes,’ Simms said. ‘It was. And we wouldn’t have Marta’s name now if it weren’t for you. I won’t forget that, Ella.’

The young constable hesitated, and Simms understood – it was still hard for a female officer to get noticed for the right reasons in policing. ‘I won’t let anyone else forget it either,’ Simms added.

George Howard was wearing a pale-blue shirt with a blue-and-mauve paisley pattern tie. His house was still locked down, and the shirt still held its creases from the shop wrapping. This was the third day since his arrest, and Howard didn’t seem quite so sure of himself.

‘Why didn’t you say you were drinking with Frank and Sol Henry on the evening of the murder?’ Simms asked.

His eyes widened – only a fraction – but she caught it.

He said, ‘Are those the men you keep trying to place me with?’

She smiled. ‘You, with your spreadsheets and profit predictions and pre-tax results, expect me to believe you didn’t know about your nearest rivals?’

He shrugged and Simms said, ‘Could you respond for the tape, please, Mr Howard?’

‘I went for a drink at my local,’ he said. ‘If, as you say, they also run a business in the area, it’s not so strange that we would bump into each other from time to time.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ she said. He shrugged again. ‘They say that they had arranged a meeting with you.’

He shook his head, then leaned forward to speak into the recorder. ‘No,’ he said.

She glanced at the statements in front of her. ‘They say you were “drunk and argumentative” when they put you in a taxi at around midnight.’

‘They can say what they like – it doesn’t make it true.’

‘You said you don’t remember how the night ended – how can you say what’s true and what isn’t?’

He didn’t reply.

‘You see, to make your story true, the pub landlord would have to be lying; Sol and Frank Henry would have to be lying. I can’t see why they would do that, can you?’

His solicitor looked across at him. ‘George?’

‘No comment.’

‘I can’t see why
they
would lie, but I could see why
you
would, Mr Howard.’

His grey eyes met hers, wary, trapped.

‘You had an appointment to see a new “masseuse” on Thursday night. Is that correct?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘You’re a methodical person, Mr Howard,’ Simms said. ‘As we speak, people are scouring your BlackBerry and your diary.’

He dropped his gaze and she heard the compulsive
tic-tic-tic
of him picking at the scabs on his hands.

She waited, watching his eyes dart left and right under his lowered lids. Finally, he said, ‘It was a girl called Marta.’

Simms held her breath.

‘But she didn’t show up.’

Simms looked at Howard, and then his solicitor. Howard was sweating, but his face was grey. His solicitor, though, was bug-eyed – furious that he’d lied to her, or that he’d been found out in a lie – Simms really didn’t care which.

‘The murder victim’s name was Marta,’ she said. ‘She worked for the Henry brothers. That is, until the night
you
were supposed to meet with her.’

He dragged his fingers through his hair, and the grey of his eyes seemed to waver and drift; this was a man who knew he was screwed and couldn’t understand how he’d got into this mess.

‘I told you,’ he said, way too late to have any credibility, ‘she didn’t show up.’

‘You withhold key evidence about the murder victim. You swear you don’t remember what happened after you were drinking in the pub. Then, when you can’t deny that any longer, you tell me that you
did
have an appointment with Marta but she didn’t show up.’

George Howard lifted his hands onto the table. He had picked every scab from the scratches, leaving pale pink notches and lines of shiny skin.

‘Let me tell you how this looks, Mr Howard,’ she said. ‘It looks like you kept quiet about the Henrys because you
knew
they couldn’t provide you with an alibi. You did meet with the Henrys. What they said made you angry, but you’d already invited Marta for a try-out, so you went ahead with it.’

He groaned and rubbed the heel of one hand into his eye socket.

‘The Henrys are hard men – maybe you felt hurt and humiliated.’

Behind his hands he was shaking his head.

‘So you decided to take it out on one of their girls.’

‘Please, stop!’ He dragged his hands from his face. ‘Just stop it.’

For aching seconds nobody moved, nobody spoke.

‘I know what you think of me, Chief Inspector. But there are things you don’t understand.’ He heaved a sigh.

The atmosphere in the room was one of expectation. He really was going to confess. Simms wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She’d been so sure that Howard was set up, and now he was about to admit he had murdered Marta.

‘I suppose,’ he said, tentatively, ‘that if a person was so drunk or traumatized by … something that he couldn’t remember, he might plead …?’

‘Diminished responsibility,’ his solicitor said automatically.

‘So if he had certain … memories.’ He pressed his thumb into his breastbone as if to quell a pain. ‘Certain … images, things he couldn’t understand, but which were truly awful. What might he—’

He flinched at a knock at the door.

Shit
. Simms turned angrily. It was Renwick. ‘Not
now
,’ she said.

He stood his ground. ‘Sorry, Boss,’ he said. ‘You need to hear this.’

Renwick was standing with Kilfoyle, the soft-featured constable who had led the canvassing teams.

‘I showed the landlord the Henrys mugshots,’ Kilfoyle said. ‘It was definitely them that Howard was drinking with.’

‘I know,’ Simms said, ‘I have the pink slip to prove it.’ She looked from one to the other, trying hard not to tap her foot with impatience. If they had interrupted her interview for this …

‘I was on my way back here when he rang my mobile,’ Kilfoyle said. ‘The picture jogged his memory.’ She saw excitement in his soft blue eyes. ‘Only
one
of the Henrys left with Howard on the night of the murder. The other – “the tall, mad-eyed one” – left half an hour earlier after taking a call.’

So, Frank Henry had left the pub a half-hour before midnight. She stared at Kilfoyle, with Howard’s near-confession swirling in her head. She knew one thing for certain: the Henrys hadn’t told her the whole truth, and she didn’t intend to charge Howard until she had that.

She stepped back into the interview room, announcing her return for the tape.

‘I’m requesting a consultation with my client before we proceed,’ his solicitor said. It seemed she’d shaken off her outrage that Howard had lied to her and had clicked back into professional mode again.

‘I’d like Mr Howard to finish what he was saying before we were interrupted,’ Simms said.

Howard turned his flat, grey stare on her. It seemed he too had made use of the break to recalibrate his feelings. ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ he said. ‘Except I’m not a killer.’

31

‘There are a lot of lies going around … and some of them are true.’

S
IR
W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL

Fennimore stood in the arched entrance of his hotel, watching for Kate Simms’s arrival. The temperature had dropped, the air was sharp, the pavements cold and iron hard. He enjoyed the bite in the air, needing it to clear his head; in the hours since he walked back to the city he had chased lab results, lost a couple of hundred on the races, and done something that was possibly very stupid, and which he would almost certainly regret.

Betting on the races was a distraction from the calculations he would otherwise do obsessively, compulsively, over and over in his head. But gambling was like a sugar high – peaks led to troughs – you needed to limit your intake. His two other palliatives were work and rock climbing. Work, because it required a mental immersion that excluded the helpless, despairing thoughts that otherwise crowded in; rock climbing because it required total physical commitment; the downside being there was only so much rock climbing you could do before it became a thinly masked suicide bid. So, mostly he relied on work to keep him sane.

He caught sight of her, approaching unexpectedly from the right. Her normally long, loose stride was tightened slightly by the cold, and in the hundred-yard stretch to the hotel, she checked over her shoulder twice.

As she reached the building, a few small flakes of snow drifted to the pavement, glittering and pink-tinged in the street lights.

It was too late for a bar meal, so Simms settled for tonic water and peanuts and Fennimore ordered a double measure of Jura single malt.

He listened to details of her exchange with Detective Superintendent Spry, her interviews at the Henry brothers’ salon, and George Howard’s near-confession.

‘Amy – the girl working on reception – rang me on my mobile at six this evening. Marta’s clingy punter turned up.’

‘By the look on your face, I’m guessing Trevor was a disappointment.’

She shrugged. ‘Arrested, interviewed, released without charge. Trevor Hillesley was celebrating his silver wedding anniversary on Thursday night. The party finished at 12.30 and his wife reports that between 1.30 and 2 a.m., Trevor was hurling up his Indian buffet and swearing off booze for the rest of his days.’

‘It’s still Howard in the frame then,’ he said. ‘Although you do have that anomaly in the Henrys’ story.’

‘Big fat porky pie, you mean.’

‘Even if they are lying, half an hour isn’t enough time to do all that was done to Marta.’

‘Well, I’m not going to break their alibis,’ Simms said. ‘The girls who were supposedly partying with them are word perfect.’

‘I can imagine,’ Fennimore said. ‘D’you really think Howard was about to confess?’

She nodded. ‘I’m just not sure to what. I think he’s remembering things. I’m damn sure he knows more than he’s telling us.’

Fennimore worked back through what she’d told him. ‘He said that there were images in his head he couldn’t understand?’

‘
Awful
images, he said. And he used the word “traumatized”. I know, you’re thinking Rohypnol, but it’s no use to us – we could never prove it.’

‘Of course we can.’

She pinched the top of her nose and closed her eyes. ‘Am I missing something here, Nick? Because I thought Rohypnol was short-lived. It only stays in the blood and body tissues for a few hours, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s certainly true of the soft tissues – the squishy bits that process the nasties and help us to eliminate them from our bodies – but hair is a different story. Toxins persist in the shaft of hair until it falls out.’ He stopped short. ‘Please don’t tell me Mr Howard is bald.’

The gleam in her eye told him that George Howard had a good head of hair.

‘On the other hand, the concept of the Henrys framing their commercial rival for murder is a bit extreme if they just wanted him out of the way.’

‘So why would they drug him?’

‘I didn’t say they did.’

He could see her thinking back over the last few minutes of discussion. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘Some people take the stuff voluntarily,’ he said. ‘They use it as a disinhibitor, to heighten the sexual experience.’

‘Seems a bit pointless,’ she said, ‘if you can’t remember what you did.’

‘A very practical objection, Chief Inspector. Voluntary use is normally at lower dosages – reduces the amnesia risk. But the potency of illegal drugs varies enormously; it could be he simply overdid it.’

She shook her head. ‘No, that won’t wash. Doctor Cooper thought there might be two assailants.’

‘
Might
be,’ he emphasized. ‘He’s not certain – though I would be fascinated to know where Frank Henry went after receiving that call on his mobile.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Me too. But I can’t see him taking us into his confidence, can you?’

He didn’t need to answer that question, so they sat in silence for a few minutes, Kate staring at the bubbles rising in her drink. Her eyes flickered occasionally to the entrance, and she watched the few remaining customers with more than idle interest.

‘Worried about your stalker?’ he asked.

‘No.’ She’d answered too quickly, and added more casually, ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because you came here from the west this evening.’

‘Very cryptic
.
’ She took a sip of her drink and set it lightly down on the table, as if she didn’t have a care in the world.