A Shred of Evidence (28 page)

Lloyd frowned. “Have you been drinking?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you want to breathalyze me too? You haven’t done that yet. What else? An intimate personal search for illegal substances? Can I choose which of you does it?”

This was a new Cochrane. He’d been drinking, but he was far from drunk, in Lloyd’s estimation. This was a Cochrane very near the edge. It was mutiny, of a sort. He’d behaved exactly as he was expected to behave for as long as he could. Now he was past caring. But he couldn’t afford to be.

“This is a very serious matter, Mr. Cochrane,” Lloyd reminded him.

Cochrane smiled. “Of course it’s serious,” he said. “I’ve found myself in a Kafka novel—how serious can you get?”

Lloyd raised his eyebrows a little. “From your television appearances, I understood that you weren’t much of a man for literature,” he said.

“I’m not,” said Cochrane. “But I do know what
The Trial
’s about. I’m just prepared to admit that I haven’t read it, unlike other people.”

Neither had Lloyd. But he could quote it, with a slight amendment.
“Someone must have slandered Colin C, because one morning, without his having done anything wrong, he was arrested,”
he said, quietly.

“Quite,” said Cochrane.

“No!”
shouted Lloyd, bringing the flat of his hand down on the table, making Cochrane jump.

Judy didn’t even react; she knew his tactics. She just sat with her pen poised over her notebook.

“Not quite, Mr. Cochrane,” Lloyd went on, his tone normal again. “Because I have
not
arrested you, though every rule in the book says that I should have.”

Cochrane frowned.

“Natalia’s body was found on the Green, and your car was seen speeding away from the scene. The body smelt of your deodorant—you have twenty minutes which you can only
account for with an uncorroborated story, you washed the clothes you had been wearing when you were out, and then to cap it all you came in here with an obviously trumped-up alibi.”

“She smelt of—?” Cochrane began, but Lloyd carried on.

“But I didn’t arrest you, because I don’t believe you killed her. I think you’ve been having an affair with her, though.”

Judy reacted this time. Lloyd hadn’t tested this theory on her.

Tom had said that afternoon that Mrs. Cochrane would hardly be protecting a convicted rapist, but Lloyd thought that might be in essence just what she was doing. “You know all about DNA, don’t you, Mr. Cochrane?” he said. “You know that it can determine the identity of someone who has had sex with a woman, and you know how. But you had used a condom when you were with Natalia—so whatever we’d found to analyse, it had nothing to do with you, and you knew that. And you agreed to a blood test.”

“This is …” The young man’s head was shaking all the time.

Judy was writing everything down, not taking part in this.

“But you didn’t drive home when you left there, did you? You drove up to the school to work out your cover story for your wife, now that she had proof of what you were doing. Because she’s what
made
you drive out of there as though the hounds of hell were after you.”

“No—no, this isn’t true.”

“And Natalia ran away from your wife, right into the arms of a homicidal maniac,” Lloyd said. “Your dog found her body. Your wife was frightened—she didn’t tell us what she’d seen. She was keeping you out of it, but in reality she was protecting a psychopath. And you were too fond of your own skin to tell us the truth, and let us get on with finding him.”

There was a silence, then Cochrane exploded, this time making Judy jump.

“I was never anywhere near the Green! I never touched Natalie! I have told you what I was doing—it wasn’t very glamorous, and it wasn’t very clever, and I’m sorry I can’t
produce three independent witnesses who saw me throwing up all over myself, but that’s what I was doing! I wasn’t with Natalie, I wasn’t driving my car, I wasn’t running away from my wife! Is that clear enough for you?”

Lloyd stared at him. He couldn’t still deny it, for God’s sake.

“Mr. Cochrane,” Judy said, her voice calm. “We
do
have a witness. An independent witness—one who saw your car reverse at speed on to Ash Road from the service road on the Green at five minutes to ten on Tuesday night.”

“None of this is real,” said Cochrane. “It’s a fiction. Someone’s making this whole thing up.” He smiled. “Someone’s inventing it,” he said.

“Why would this man lie about seeing your car?” Lloyd asked.

Cochrane looked back at him with eyes that held no spark, no light. Just an acceptance of defeat. “I don’t think he’s lying,” he said, still smiling. “He’s just saying what he believes. But he imagined it.”

Lloyd sat back. “Like the writer of these letters imagined what you and she had done?” he asked. “Like your wife imagined that you were having an affair? Does everyone involved with you imagine things?”

“Yes,” said Cochrane, his expression not changing. “Yes. But all this is the work of someone
else
’s imagination—it must be, because none of these things happened. This is Natalie’s fantasy,” he said. “It must be. Natalie’s making the whole thing up.”

Judy glanced at Lloyd, who shrugged a little. Perhaps Cochrane was Freddie’s psychopath, after all. Natalia was dead when Mrs. Cochrane found her, as Finch kept insisting, and she was covering up for her deranged husband, for reasons best known to herself. “Natalia’s dead, Mr. Cochrane,” he said. “She isn’t making anything up now, if she ever was.”

Cochrane sat forward. “And I wasn’t driving my car at nine fifty-five on Tuesday night,” he said. “It was at the school. I’d left it there because it wouldn’t start.”

“Why did you go back for it, in that case? What made you think it would start then?”

“Patrick said he’d mend it for me.”

“Patrick?”

“Patrick Murray. He’s good with cars. He said he’d see what he could do and—” Cochrane broke off.

“Yes?” said Lloyd.

“Patrick,” he said, his eyes alive again. “He must have been driving my car—it must have been him. He had the keys.”

“Is this the new English teacher?” asked Judy.

“Yes—don’t you see?
He
must have been driving it!”

“How did you get the keys back?” asked Lloyd, refusing to react to Cochrane’s sudden animation but excited all the same, even if his latest theory had been wildly wrong. “You drove it home, remember.”

“He left them under an ornamental tree thing at the back gate,” said Cochrane. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see? Patrick has to have been driving it!” His eyes widened. “That’s why the mail was piled up like that!” he said. “It must be—I didn’t leave it like that, covering up the rear window. I don’t do that.”

“Perhaps,” said Lloyd. He didn’t know what Cochrane was talking about, but it hardly mattered. They were just one step away now.

Cochrane looked at him open-mouthed. “Perhaps?” he repeated.
“Perhaps?”

“I’ll check it out.”

Patrick Murray had only just started at the school—a perfect hunting ground for a sex killer. Would Natalia have felt safe with him? Yes, probably. A teacher. Offered her a lift home, perhaps.

Cochrane had slumped back down, elbows on the table, head in hands, because of Lloyd’s lack of enthusiasm, but Lloyd couldn’t afford any of that right now. They still had to prove it.

“If Patrick Murray wasn’t driving my car,” Cochrane said, “then you’re all—every last one of you—all just part of Natalie’s fantasy.”

Murray would have to be going some to beat Cochrane in the weirdo stakes, thought Lloyd.

Cochrane looked up at him and gave him a half smile. “But
I’m still just about sane enough,” he added, “to think that that isn’t very likely.”

“I’m sorry,” said the girl at the other end of the line. “Mr. Cochrane isn’t in his room.”

“It’s his wife,” said Erica, a little desperately.

“Sorry,” she said. “He isn’t in the hotel at the moment.”

“You mean he isn’t taking my calls,” said Erica.

“He just isn’t—”

Erica put the receiver back on the rest. Surely he wasn’t still with the police? He had gone there of his own accord—they couldn’t keep him all afternoon, surely? She would just have to go to the hotel, find out for herself. But … she sighed. She did have to talk to Patrick.

She picked up the receiver again.

Patrick shook his head as he read the paper over the shoulder of the teacher whose evening paper had caused the staff room to come to a standstill. No one was even answering the phone.

The earwigging barman must have tipped off the reporter last night. And Colin had been getting drunk; this Will Marlow must have thought it was his birthday, with Colin slagging off the police to him. It would be in the nationals tomorrow, Patrick had no doubt.

And he didn’t fancy Colin’s chances with the head once he saw the paper; he might be a bit vague and like everything to be frightfully friendly and informal, but he wasn’t going to take kindly to this.

Good. Erica would suffer too, and he, Patrick, would be on hand to comfort her, to be a tower of strength, to be a friend in need. Things were working out just fine.

Someone finally answered the phone, and called out Patrick’s name. He made his way through the crowded staff room, still buzzing as the evening paper was passed from hand to hand, no one going home in the middle of this juicy bit of scandal. No one could remember seeing Colin this afternoon; they were rather hoping to see what would almost certainly be a
show-down between him and the head, but it looked as though they might be cheated of that.

“Hello, yes?” he said, his finger in his ear.

“Patrick, it’s Erica. I need to talk to you.”

He smiled. This was perfect. Perfect. She was rattled by the newspaper report. She needed a friend, and he was it. “I’ll be down directly,” he said.

He ran down the stairs through the reluctantly departing teachers, knocked on the office door and went in.

She had been crying. “Close the door,” she said. “Lock it.”

He nodded, and shut and locked the door. “Erica,” he said as he turned to face her. “It wasn’t really his fault. He was drunk—I think the barman at the hotel set him up.”

She frowned. “What?” she said.

“This stuff in the evening paper. Don’t worry about it. It’ll be a storm in a teacup. He was very down—this bloke Marlow just took advantage.”

“I don’t want to talk about the evening paper,” she said, looking faintly puzzled.

Patrick frowned. “Haven’t you seen it?” he asked. “Colin’s sounding off about the police questioning him.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” she said. “I’m not surprised—are you?”

He closed his eyes briefly. This was not a moment of his choosing, but from her tone of voice it was the only one he was going to get.

“It was you,” she said. “In Colin’s car. Wasn’t it?”

What to do? Claim ignorance? Futile. She knew it was him. The question was clearly rhetorical. “Yes,” he said, and sat down opposite her. The Cochranes had clearly ignored his advice and had started communicating. It had always been a gamble. Where was Colin? Why weren’t they presenting a united front?

“How could you do that?” she asked.

“Which?” he asked in return. “I’ve lost count of the terrible things I’ve done this last two days.”

“How could you let Colin take the blame?”

“Ah, no,” said Patrick. “No, I didn’t do that—I wouldn’t. When Victoria said the police had taken him in, I thought they
must know about the car, and I’d have to tell them it was me driving it, not him.”

Erica looked more than a little sceptical. “I didn’t see you rushing off to confess,” she said.

“But they
didn’t
know about the car,” Patrick said. “You hadn’t even told him what you’d seen, not then.”

She gave a short sigh. “I still haven’t,” she said.

Hope. Hope was creeping through his soul again. If the police didn’t know yet, there might still be a chance.

“They are going to be told,” she warned him, seeing his relief. “I just wanted to talk to you first.”

Patrick nodded. “It’s more than I deserve,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But I couldn’t just—tell them. Not without warning you.”

“Thank you,” he said.

She looked at him, her head shaking. “I can’t believe you took Colin’s car to have sex with a fifteen-year-old girl,” she said.

“No, no—no. It wasn’t like that.”

“Are you saying you didn’t have sex with her?” she asked sharply. “Because I heard what was going on, Patrick.”

“No. I did have … I did.”

“And you used Colin’s car! Because you didn’t want to risk picking up an under-age girl in your own car? It would be better if Colin got the blame for it?”

“No. It’s not the way you think it was.” Patrick had to try to explain to her. To both of them. Why was Colin letting Erica do this on her own? “Where is Colin?” he asked.

“For all I know, he’s still with the police!”

Patrick’s hopes nose-dived. “He’s where?” he said.

“Oh, don’t worry, Patrick,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcastic concern. “Colin doesn’t know either.”

Patrick blew out his cheeks. There really was hope, if he just played it right. That was all he had to do, and he could be home free. He leant on the table. “Erica,” he said. “I don’t suppose you could possibly think again about telling the police?”

Her mouth fell open. “This has been a nightmare for Colin,” she said. “And it’s still going on!”

Patrick licked his lips. “I know, I know,” he said. “But
he
knows they’ve got the wrong man. They’re doing a DNA test—you know? Genetic fingerprinting?”

She nodded. “I know,” she said.

“By next week they’ll know they’ve got the wrong man too,” said Patrick desperately.

Erica blinked at him in disbelief. “Another week of this? That’ll seem like a lifetime to Colin! They suspect him, Patrick—don’t you understand what you’ve done?”

“Yes,” said Patrick desperately. “But hear me out, Erica, please. Everything they’ve done—taking away his clothes, taking a blood sample—don’t you see? That will go to prove he wasn’t there. Because he wasn’t.”