A Killing Karma (23 page)

Casey leaned
back on the hard chair in the windowless interview room and stared across the
scarred table at Caitlin Osborne. She looked grubby and unkempt, which was to
be expected if she'd been living on the streets or in some derelict building.
‘Okay. You said you killed your father. So what time was this?’ he asked her.
‘And how did you get him into that alleyway? We know his body was moved after
death.’

The last
question seemed to give her problems because she was silent for several
seconds, then she said, as if suddenly inspired, 'I don't know exactly what
time it was as I've pawned my watch. But it was getting towards dusk. I'd been
waiting for him in the shadows behind a large shrub and I killed him as he came
out of the house. He was startled and I was able to take him by surprise before
he was able to react. No one could see me as the house is quite private and the
hedges surrounding the house screens it well. The side gate was unlocked. I hid
him in the garden shed for a couple of days — I needed the time to get up my
nerve to move him. There was no wood or coal stored there so I didn't think his
wife would go in there. I used his own wheelbarrow to move him early on Monday
morning; it was just sitting there on the back path. I had the knife because
I've been living on the streets in the town and I needed it to protect myself.’

‘Did you see
Mrs Oliver at all?’

‘Before he
came out and while I was waiting, I could see her in the downstairs room. She
was reading.’

'I see. What
did you do all over the weekend? Wait in the shed with the body?’

She nodded
again, but said nothing more.

'A bit spooky,
wasn't it?’

‘It was dry
and private. Better than the streets. And I've slept in worse.’

‘How were you
sure he was dead?’

'I just was,
all right? He didn't move. He just lay there as unresponsive in death as he'd
been in life.’ She gave them a twisted smile as she said, 'I remember thinking
that it was the longest time I'd spent with him in my whole life.’

‘So what did
you do with the knife?’ Catt put in.

For a moment,
she looked anxious as if scared her story was unravelling. Then she said, 'I
lost it somewhere. I bought some smack after I dumped his body in the alley and
the rest of the night's a blur.’

So far, it
sounded plausible enough. If it wasn't for the fact that Caitlin was skin and
bone. She looked half-starved and probably was. Her face was pasty with deep
shadows under her eyes. Her lank hair was unwashed and uncombed. Altogether,
she looked a wreck, incapable of either moving a man's dead body or formulating
any kind of plan.

But then
again, the outline of her murderous attack hadn't called for any great
planning; merely the luck not to be seen. Though the strength required to shift
Oliver looked to be lacking, which was a weak point on which Casey tackled her.

‘Did you have
help to move him?’ Oliver hadn't been a heavy man, but he would have been a
dead weight. Surely she hadn't been able to shift him along to the alley on her
own?

But she
insisted that was just what she had done. ‘He deserved to die. I'm not sorry I
killed him. I'm glad he's dead. He treated me like dirt. Ignored me all my
life.’

Casey felt
sorry for the girl. He could sympathise with her rampant self-pity. She was
still very young, her father’s rejection of her clearly still very raw. But was
this claim to have killed the father who had rejected her just a drug-fuelled
fantasy, one enacted in Caitlin's mind over and over again until she had come
to believe in its veracity? Or was she telling the truth? They had enough for
now to hold her so she wouldn't disappear like the runaway commune pair.
Meanwhile, they would see if Alice Oliver or any of her neighbours had noticed
Caitlin hanging around the house.

After
cautioning her and suggesting she avail herself of the services of the duty
solicitor, Casey left the room, followed by Catt, and gestured to the uniformed
officer waiting outside the door that she was to be taken to the cells.

‘Think she did
it?’ Catt asked.

‘As to that,
God knows. She doesn't look as if she could lift a kitten, never mind a grown
man. Moving him to the alley and tipping him out of the wheelbarrow wouldn't be
easy.’

‘Maybe hate
gave her the required strength.’

‘Maybe so. She
certainly seems to have been nursing plenty of it.’

Catt, the
abandoned product of a number of children's homes, remarked, ‘Can't blame her
for that. Her father must have been more of a bastard than she is to ignore her
as he did. I'm surprised she persisted in trying to see him and gain his
acknowledgement.’

‘She seems the
obsessive type. And then she's had treatment for paranoia, according to Alice
Oliver. Who's to say what action her tormented mind might order up? Perhaps
living rough on the streets, as she has for the past few weeks, concentrated
her mind. Anyway, hopefully one of the Olivers' neighbours will be able to
enlighten us if she was loitering with intent.’

The Olivers'
neighbours proved not to have noticed a loitering Caitlin. Neither had Alice
Oliver when Casey and Catt questioned her. But if she'd been in the drawing
room with the lights on she would have been able to see little outside and the
double glazing would have muffled all but the loudest noise.

It was another
possibility with nothing to prove it either way. Even if Caitlin Osborne was
guilty, Casey felt it unlikely she would have to face a charge of murder. As
with Moon and Star, her brief would doubtless try to persuade her to plead
diminished responsibility, especially given her medical history.

What now?
Casey wondered as he settled down to yet more reports. Surely they must get a
breakthrough in both cases soon? In this, he was lucky — in the commune murder
investigation at least. For the runaway pair of Scott Johnson and Randy
Matthews had been found and were singing like caged canaries according to Catt
when he sauntered in.

‘So what have
they said?’ Casey questioned as Catt sat down.

‘That Dylan
and DaisyMay weren't quite the love's young dream we've been led to believe.’

'Oh?'

‘No. Johnson
and Matthews were in the next bedroom, they said, and often heard the pair
rowing.’

‘What about?
Did they hear?’

‘No. All they
heard was voices shouting, but not the words. Still, it's a pointer that Dylan
might not be as grief-stricken as we've been led to believe. Maybe he
discovered that DaisyMay had been meeting Callender for afternoon drinkies and
had concluded that the drinks had led to something more, as drink so often
does.’

‘Maybe so.
Perhaps it's time I pulled him out of his bedroom again and asked him a few
more questions. Probably should have pressed him harder when I spoke to him
last time,’ Casey acknowledged.

‘Better late
than never.’

Reluctantly,
Casey said, ‘I’ll drive up there this evening.’ He hoped that evening's
questioning brought some answers worthy of the round trip because he was
heartily tired of the journey.

Dylan Harper,
when, for the second time, he was winkled from his bedroom, proved even more
sullen and uncooperative than the last time he’d been questioned.

‘You do want
your girlfriend's killer caught?’ Casey asked. This only brought a glowering
response.

‘Only that's
not the impression you're giving. You and Ms Smith had a number of rows before
her death, I understand?’

This got his
attention. ‘Who told you that?,’ he sharply demanded.

‘That's not
important. But I notice you don't deny it.’

‘It was a hard
time for both of us. DaisyMay had a difficult pregnancy. She threw up morning,
noon and night and often couldn't sleep and that woke me up. The lack of sleep
made both of us irritable, inclined to snap at the least little thing.’

‘And that's
all the rows were about?’

That's all,’
Dylan insisted.

‘Not because
DaisyMay had been out drinking with Kris Callender?’

Dylan made no
response to this.

‘She was seen,
you understand. They looked very friendly.’

‘Why wouldn't
they?’ Dylan snapped. ‘There
were
friends, man. We were all friends.’

‘But not any more?’

‘How can I be
friends with any of them until I learn which of them killed her?’

Dylan's
response was entirely natural. So why did Casey think the man wasn't telling
him the entire truth?

If Casey found
it hard to believe in Caitlin Osborne's confession of guilt over her father's
murder, he found it even harder to believe in the innocence of several of the
other suspects in the case. Fallon, in particular, given his tendency to
violence, headed the suspect list.

But, unless something
moved on the investigation, he was stumped as to how he would prove Fallon, or
any of them, a murderer. And although they now had the CCTV footage as well as
the neighbour's statement, Fallon had still denied he'd had anything to do with
Oliver's death. Without forensics to link him to the killing, it was stalemate.

He and Catt
had also closely questioned each of the other suspects, again with the same result
as before: lots of protestations of innocence mostly, plus the odd burst of
temper. Even the polite and reserved Alice Oliver seemed to be losing her cool.
Apart from Mrs Oliver, they had all followed the example set by Fallon and
equipped themselves with a solicitor who would fend off any more unwanted
questions.

But at least
things were moving in their shadow investigation. It was Catt's contact in the
Lincolnshire force who provided them with the breakthrough.

The DNA
results were in, as Catt revealed the next morning. ‘Turns out Kris Callender
was
going to be a daddy twice over. He not only fathered young Madonna Redfern's
child, he also fathered DaisyMay's.’'

‘That still
begs the question of whether Dylan knew.’ Casey paused. ‘Wait a minute. Dylan
told me he had had mumps as a child — which would explain why he took such a
relaxed attitude to the disease when the boy, Billy, brought it home. But what
if he lied? What if he'd caught the disease when he was a grown man and it made
him infertile?’

‘Then he'd
have known for sure that DaisyMay had cheated on him,’ Catt finished. ‘Just
like Max Fallon when he caught the clap.’

‘Exactly.
Better check out Dylan Harper's medical records. Find out if he had mumps as a
boy or later.’

‘I’m on to
it,’ Catt told him as he made for the door.

The line of
inquiry into their newly-elegant tramp theory on the official murder
investigation came to nothing, in spite of a smelly parade of men of the road
being hauled into the station and questioned. They had the same result on
finding the murder weapon. But on their
un
official
investigation,
Catt had found out that Dylan Harper had lied about one thing at least — his
claim that he had had mumps as a boy
.
He hadn't: he had contracted the
disease as an adult.

Casey had been
right in his guess. But now he decided to err on the side of caution. 'I
suppose it's possible he might have thought the doctors had made a mistake and
he wasn't infertile at all.’

‘That's one
view,’ said Catt. ‘On the other hand, maybe he didn't doubt the doctor's
diagnosis. Maybe he just went along with the idea that the baby was his for his
own purposes. You said he and DaisyMay had been an item for two years?’

Casey nodded.

‘He caught mumps
some months before he met DaisyMay,’ Catt told him. ‘What do you bet he didn't
tell DaisyMay that he couldn't give her babies?’

‘I told you,
ThomCatt — I don't bet. But even if I did, that's one bet I certainly wouldn't
take you up on. Dylan must have known as soon as she told him she was pregnant
that she'd been unfaithful. I think he must have planned to kill her all along.
Why else would he have spoilt her in that unlikely fashion throughout her
pregnancy, but to make himself look the eager soon-to-be dad? Moon told me he
doted on her during the weeks of her pregnancy. That he would hardly let her do
a thing. Strange behaviour from a man who must have known she'd been cheating
on him.’

‘Covering the
tracks he intended to make. A gypsy's revenge. Crafty.’

‘But not
crafty enough. Did you tell your Lincolnshire policeman about our discovery?’

‘You bet. Or
not.’ Catt rubbed his hands. 'I think we can expect an arrest very shortly.
Don't you?’

Casey nodded.
‘Let's just hope we have a similar result soon in our own investigation,’ Casey
put in before Catt became too gung-ho.

Catt's face
fell. ‘I'd almost forgotten about that in all the excitement,’ he revealed.

'I hadn't. But
I've had an idea about that.’