A Game of Proof (34 page)

‘Ninety five per cent certain, yes sir. We’ll be completely sure if anything comes back on the hood and clothes from forensics. Not that it matters anyway. We found it all too late.’

Churchill slumped onto a desk in the corner of the incident room. On the wall behind him were photographs of the unsolved murder of Maria Clayton, eight months ago. A few feet to his right, a similar collage of the assault on Karen Whitaker. Churchill thumped the wall in frustration. ‘You thought he did both of these, too, Terry, didn’t you?’

‘He’s still a possible for Clayton, yes, sir. But not Whitaker - the DNA didn’t match up.’

‘Nevertheless, you believe this man Harker may have killed Clayton as well as raping Gilbert. You told this Newby woman that, did you? That if he’s killed and raped already, he’s likely to do it again? You did mention that?’

‘I told her, yes, but it didn’t make any impression.’

‘What kind of a bitch is she?’ Churchill muttered. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it.’

Tracy Litherland intervened. ‘I think she’s a very determined, focused lady, sir, who’s under a lot of stress but won’t let anyone slap her down.’ Terry had always suspected that she shared his dislike for their new chief, but never before had she made it so plain.

Churchill rolled his eyes. ‘Thanks for the feminist perspective, Trace. But that’s precisely what we
did
see last night - Harker slapping her down. And now she won’t stand up to him.’

Stubbornly, Tracy repeated Sarah’s reasons; the very reasons that she and Terry had spent so much time arguing against, only a few hours ago.

Churchill sighed impatiently: ‘Yes, Trace, but there is such a thing as the public interest, or had you forgotten? You know, keeping murderers and rapists off the streets, that sort of thing. Aren’t lawyers supposed to be interested in that, too?’

‘Lawyers, sir?’ Tracy shook her head.

‘No.’ Churchill answered his own question with a grim laugh. ‘For them it’s all just a game, ain’t it? Just a sodding game.’

It hardly seemed like a game to Sarah and Lucy, just then. They had spent the afternoon in Lucy’s office, discussing Sarah’s decision not to give a statement. Sarah was relieved that Lucy seemed to understand; Lucy was wondering just how much more her friend could take.

Sarah, she thought, had already suffered too much in the past few days. She was pale, with a bruise along her jaw and her eye half closed. She looked exhausted too, which was hardly surprising. Not only had her son been arrested for murder, and she herself nearly raped, but Emily had run away from home and been feared murdered less than a month ago. All this in addition to the almost routine discovery that she was responsible for the acquittal of a guilty man.

Any one of these things would reduce most people to a gibbering wreck, crawling to a psychiatrist for post-traumatic stress counseling. All Lucy could offer was tea, talk and sympathy. To her surprise it seemed to work quite well. Sarah still seemed able to talk and think and lift a teacup without screaming and hurling it against the wall. Which helped, because they had serious questions to discuss.

Such as how to defend Simon. And his apparent connection with Gary Harker.

Sarah closed her eyes, and a childhood memory came to her, of a trip to the beach at Blackpool when she was small. She had been exploring a rock pool with her father and they had seen a small crab scurry for shelter under a stone. Sarah had been afraid to pick up the stone and so her father had lifted it for her. But under the stone, instead of the tiny crab which she expected, was a much, much bigger one. A huge crab, its shelly body as wide as her face, its vast serrated pincers raised in fury, its eyes on stalks swivelling intently towards her pink little toes, six scaly legs clattering sideways towards her while she screamed and screamed ...

She shuddered at the memory, then glanced at Lucy doodling on a pad of paper. Outside, the evening rush hour was beginning.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve kept you. You’ll be wanting to go home,’ she said.

Lucy smiled. ‘Why now? I’ll just sit in a jam. They won’t expect me till seven.’

Sarah took a step nearer the stone in her mind. ‘The only thing I’d regret about Gary, would be if he’d really committed all these attacks, as Terry Bateson thinks he did.’

Lucy considered this. ‘There’s evidence to disprove that.’

‘In one of the cases, yes. They found some DNA on a hair from Karen Whitaker’s attacker that wasn’t a match for Gary.’

‘There you are then. It wasn’t him.’

‘He could still have murdered the first one. The prostitute, Maria Clayton.’

‘
Could have
. But there’s no evidence. Come on, Sarah, you know this. They wanted to charge him with that before, but the CPS turned them down. They couldn’t prove it then and they can’t now. A hundred men
could
have done it.’

‘Including my son? Simon?’

This was the sort of remark that Lucy feared. She studied Sarah cautiously before answering. An answer that was intended to rebuild confidence.

‘Including your husband and my husband and any man without an alibi, if it comes to that. Come on, Sarah - suspicion and innuendo isn’t any sort of proof.’

But Sarah had her hands around the stone now. She was going to lift it. ‘The thing is, Lucy, Terry Bateson has always thought that these attacks are the work of one man; the
Hooded Killer
the
Evening Press
writes about
.
But he can’t prove it, because for a start, one of the attacks - the one on Whitaker - was definitely committed by someone else. So he’s wrong.’

‘So he’s wrong, yup,’ Lucy nodded. ‘Not the first time a policeman’s been wrong.’

‘He’s wrong about the idea that it was
one
man, Lucy, yes.’ Sarah’s next words came out in a whisper. ‘But what if it was
two?
’

‘Two?’ Lucy wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. ‘Two men raping together?’

‘Not necessarily raping together, no, but ... co-operating. You know, maybe one does it one time, the other the next. One acting as lookout for the other, that sort of thing?’

Not just
one
huge crab under the stone, but
two
. Both with claws raised, both with faces that she recognized!

‘Oh come on, Sarah! Now you’re really in the realms of fantasy.’

‘Am I? Probably, I hope so. But look at what we know. We know - so long as the forensic examination supports it - that Gary raped Sharon Gilbert. We know he claims he was with someone else that night, this fellow called Sean whom no one could find ...’

‘We proved he existed, remember? That was one of our better moments.’

‘True. But even if we accept that this Sean exists, it doesn’t mean it was him who was with Gary that night, does it?
What if it was Simon?’

‘We don’t know that anyone was with him, Sarah.’ This was just the sort of reaction Lucy wanted to suppress. But Sarah’s imagination was in full flight.

‘Well he
said
someone was, didn’t he? And it seems Gary went into a shed - Simon’s shed - to change his clothes and dump his hood before he went home. How did he know there’d be clothes in that shed if Simon hadn’t told him? How did he know the shed even existed?’

Will Churchill strode back and forth, like a maths teacher Terry had once known. ‘Look, there’s still one question that hasn’t been answered by any of you lot.’ He tapped his teeth with a pencil. ‘And that is, what exactly is the connection between this woman’s son and Gary Harker? I mean, I know what you think he was doing in that shed, Terry, changing his clothes after the rape - but
why there
? Did the boy know what Gary’d done, or didn’t he? Was he an innocent in all this, or an accomplice?’

‘What about the other way around, sir,’ Tracy suggested. ‘Was Harker completely unconnected with the murder of Jasmine Hurst? Or was he an accomplice there too?’

A tremor of excitement passed around the room. The three men - Churchill, Terry, and Harry - shivered as though someone had walked over their graves.  Churchill waved his pencil at Tracy in a chauvinist compliment. ‘Not just a pair of pretty legs, eh, sergeant? There’s a brain behind that beauty, gents!’ Then before Tracy had time to take offence, he continued: ‘And that, of course, could be another reason why Mrs barrister Newby won’t sign a statement against Harker! Because he knows something about her son which he might blurt out in court!’

‘Oh, wait a minute, sir,’ Terry protested. ‘She must hate him more than we do - it’s not Harker she’s trying to protect, it’s her own reputation!’

‘She still has one, does she? I’m not so sure, Terence. She got him off the rape charge, she met him in that shed in the middle of the night - how do we know there isn’t something in Gary’s story after all? I mean what was she doing there? Not looking for sex maybe but what about the balaclava and those clothes and the rest of it? Maybe she was doing a deal with Harker to get rid of them. In which case she’d be an accessory after the fact.’

‘Accessory to what, sir?’ Tracy asked. ‘The rape of Sharon or ...’ Her sentence hung unfinished in the air. They tested the extraordinary possibilities in their minds. More than one crime might be linked by the events in this shed. A keen, hungry grin began to play around Will Churchill’s lips - like a wolf sighting his prey.

‘Her
reputation
she’s trying to protect, you said, Terence? She’ll need to, won’t she, if it turns out she not only knew Harker was guilty of rape, but that her own son helped him,
and
that son’s guilty of murder! The Bar Council won’t look too kindly on that, will they?’

‘It’s not possible,’ Terry said. The whole idea shocked him. ‘There’s no proof, nothing to connect her with either the rape or Jasmine Hurst’s murder ...’

‘Only the fact that Gary did the one and her son did the other; Gary and Simon seem to know each other; and she met Gary in her son’s shed!’

‘Yes, but she didn’t
choose
to meet him there,’ Terry insisted. ‘It was an accident. She went to park her bike, and there was Gary getting his watch back.’

‘Just a coincidence, eh, Terence? That’s not what Gary said.’

‘The man’s a nutter! A fantasist! Anyway we saw what he was doing.’

‘Then why won’t she press charges?’

‘To avoid publicity, sir,’ Terry repeated. ‘You understand her, don’t you, Trace?’

Tracy frowned. ‘I understand, sure, but there are other explanations.  What we need to know, surely, is what the connection between Gary and Simon actually is. Until then ...’

‘Right.’ Churchill stood up. ‘We’d better be quick. You haven’t released him, have you?’

‘No, sir. We’ve got him till ten thirty tonight, unless we charge him.’

‘Right then. Come on, Terence; let’s you and me go and see this thug, shall we?’

As they were leaving Sarah sighed and said: ‘If only it could be Gary that killed Jasmine. But the pig was on remand, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Lucy said putting on her coat. ‘
No!
No, he was free then, surely?’

‘I thought it was the day the trial ended?’

‘No. Your memory’s playing tricks.’

They stared at each other in shock. A wild hope lit in Sarah’s eyes. ‘What are the dates?’

Feverishly, they scrabbled in Lucy’s desk diary. ‘There, I was right! Last day of trial, Thursday 13th. Gary was released at what? Three, four o’clock. And Jasmine’s body was found next morning, the 14th. She was killed around midnight on the 13th.’

‘So he
could
have done it!’ Sarah breathed.

‘Yes, but what motive would he have? What reason?’

‘That man doesn’t need a motive, Lucy. He’s a monster. He raped Sharon and he attacked me. He ought to have been grateful to me if anything - I’d got him off, for Christ’s sake. But when I met him in that shed I was just there, I was a woman, I asked him what he was doing and he snapped. Did what he’s good at. He might have killed me if the police hadn’t turned up.’

‘Yes, but how would he have met Jasmine?’

‘I wish we knew,’ Sarah breathed quietly. ‘I wish we knew.’

Chapter Twenty-Four

‘N
OW THEN, Gary,’ Terry began. ‘How well do you know Simon Newby?’

Gary shrugged. ‘I’ve met him, around. On building sites and such.’

‘Mate of yours, is he?’

‘I know him, yeah.’

‘All right, tell me about him. What do you know?’

‘His mum’s got a juicy arse.’

‘Apart from that, Gary. We’ve been through all that.’

‘Been through it, copper? You wish!’ Terry tried to keep his face neutral, but Gary could see the effect his words were having. Churchill intervened, in his sneering southern accent.

‘What about her son, then, Gary? D’you fancy him too?’

‘You shut your filthy mouth! Anyhow he’s got his own bird. The dead one.’

‘Oh yes. Justine.’

‘Jasmine.’

‘Jasmine, sorry.’ Churchill corrected himself slyly. ‘You met her then?’

‘Yeah. So?’

‘Fancy her, did you?’ Terry resumed, intrigued by this discovery..

‘She was all right. Better’n he deserved.’

‘What did she look like, Gary?’ Churchill asked. ‘Describe her for us, will you?’

Gary thought for a moment. ‘Well. Quite tall for a girl. Stunner to look at. Long brown hair, pretty face. Big tits.’ He laughed, making a squeezing motion with his hands. ‘Like melons.’

A little worm of excitement woke at the base of Terry’s spine, and began to crawl up towards his brain. ‘Did you touch them, then, Gary?’

‘No chance. The lad would have killed me.’

‘But you’d have liked to touch them?’ Terry persisted. ‘If you could?’

Gary eyed him pityingly. ‘Not getting enough, are you, copper? I could take you places ...’

Smoothly, Churchill took over. ‘You say young Simon would have killed you. Is that how he behaved then, when she was around? A bit violent, protective, perhaps?’

‘Him, violent?’ Gary laughed scornfully. ‘Say boo to him and he shits his pants. I’ve seen it. Girls might be scared of him but no one else.’