After You Die (29 page)

Something about how clipped his speech became and the way he automatically angled his body away as he’d begun to talk bothered her. It was a liar’s posture, designed to shield himself, but it said more than staring either of them dead in the eye could have.

She rolled a cigarette, went over to the window to smoke it, already thinking about how best to attack Benjamin, what buttons to push and what response she wanted to elicit from him. It would be easier if they had any kind of physical evidence but in the absence of that she knew they needed to play on his personality.

It hadn’t worked with Ian Bowe or Arnold Fletcher, though.

Bowe had looked like a sound bet, now he was out of the running. Fletcher she still liked for it, saw something on him, a crusader’s zeal. He had the courage of his convictions and that made him dangerous.

Her phone pinged – Ethan telling her to come up and check out his findings.

She called across the office to Zigic, ‘We’ve got something from the laptop.’

They went up to the tech department, a smell of toasted bread and tomato sauce in the stairwell, lingering in the corridor, and they followed it to Ethan’s office; a half-eaten pepperoni pizza sitting on the counter, well away from where he was working. He had a slice in his hand and he threw it down when they walked in, wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, then scrubbed the sauce from his blond goatee, bringing some pink to his milk-white skin.

‘Didn’t think you’d be straight up,’ he said and nodded towards the grease-stained box. ‘Help yourself.’

‘I thought you were eating clean this month,’ Ferreira said.

‘I caved.’

‘What have you found then?’ Zigic asked.

‘Right, yeah.’ Ethan looked at the laptop, screen showing Benjamin’s browser history. ‘So, as we thought, he’s behind about seventy per cent of the uber-vicious comments Holly was getting, using a series of aliases, loads of different email accounts, none of them properly screened but he’s not very tech savvy by the look of this.’

‘We can prove all this?’

‘No problem.’

Zigic nodded. ‘Good, we’re getting somewhere then.’

‘What else?’ Ferreira asked.

‘Nothing you can charge him with but I thought you’d want to know, there’s a lot of porn on here.’

‘He’s a fourteen-year-old boy,’ Zigic said.

‘This isn’t run-of-the-mill.’ Ethan hopped up onto the counter, feet on the seat of his chair. ‘Sure, there’s the usual stuff we all watch but the last few months he’s been getting into more hard-core material. Rape and torture, a lot of it looks amateur.
Real
amateur, I mean, not staged. There’s videos on there he’s watched twenty times in a day.’

Zigic brushed his hand back through his hair, swore lightly.

‘We already knew he was a piece of shit,’ Ferreira said. ‘This doesn’t change anything.’

‘Some of the videos feature disabled women – paralysed women – and I really don’t think they were happy to be taking part. We’re talking care homes here, hospitals maybe. It looks really real. You can watch if you want, but—’

‘We don’t want,’ Zigic said.

‘Understandable.’

Ethan looked queasy although it hadn’t been bad enough to put him off his pizza, Ferreira thought.

He took a couple of pieces of paper from the printer tray. ‘I’ve got his browser history for you, the sites we’re talking about are starred. I thought it might be useful.’

They took the paperwork, neither speaking until they were in the stairwell again.

‘Does this change anything?’ Ferreira asked. ‘It’s showing us his mindset, but does it have any implications for the murder?’

‘Probably not,’ Zigic said. ‘It’s fucking terrifying, though, don’t you think? The things a teenager gets up to when no one’s looking.’

He was genuinely stunned by it, she saw, and she wondered at his naivety. What did he think online porn was? Just a moving version of the wank mags he probably sneaked a look at in the playground when he was a teenager? Didn’t he realise how it was out there now? How extreme tastes had become mainstream.

Maybe he was thinking about his own sons and how he would cope with knowing they’d look at stuff like that when the time came.

‘Let’s get this done then,’ he said.

Benjamin Lange had recovered his composure in the hour since Ferreira had last seen him and she put it down to the presence of his solicitor, an old-school operator in pinstripe suit and red silk tie, his thinning grey hair whipped into something approaching a bouffant.

Mr Harold waited until the recording equipment was running to officially complain about the way Benjamin had been brought in, suggested that a polite request would have served everyone involved far better.

‘He’s from a respectable family, after all. There was no need for such high-handed tactics.’

‘We’ll bear that in mind next time we need to arrest him,’ Ferreira said.

‘You might also bear in mind your failure to protect him from violence during the course of his arrest,’ Mr Harold said.

Benjamin winced as he spoke, touched a tentative hand to his jaw, which was badly swollen and shining under the strip light. The bruising hadn’t started to come out yet but it would be bad when it did.

‘Mr Prentice believes Ben killed his estranged wife and is responsible for the death of his daughter,’ Ferreira said. ‘Tempers were running high.’

‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ Benjamin said, earning a warning look from Harold. ‘What? I didn’t. Why would I want to kill her?’

‘Let’s try another question,’ Zigic said. ‘One Mr Harold won’t be so offended by. Why have you spent the last year stalking Holly?’

‘I wasn’t stalking her.’

‘No, Ben, listen – we’re not asking
if
you were stalking her. We know you were, we’ve been through your computer. We want to know
why
you did it.’

‘It’s not stalking,’ he said. ‘It’s just … making comments.’

Mr Harold looked sternly across the top of his glasses. ‘There’s nothing illegal about that.’

Ferreira opened the file she’d brought in and passed him a sheet of paper. ‘These are some of the comments Ben made. You’ll notice a bullying tone, I think. Several death threats. Which
are
illegal and we’re taking the matter very seriously. This was a concerted campaign of harassment. Motivated by Holly’s disability. Which makes it a hate crime.’

Harold glanced at the paper, then at the boy next to him, and put it down again.

‘I’m sure you’re aware of the heavy tariffs on hate crimes.’ Ferreira stared at Benjamin, waiting for him to look at her. ‘So, the question still stands, Ben. Why did you do it?’

He shrugged.

‘In words, please.’

‘I was bored.’

‘And the best thing you could think of to do with your time was harass a disabled schoolmate? Your new dad’s daughter.’

Benjamin scowled at her, a little boy having a tantrum. ‘He’s not my dad.’

‘Was that why you picked on Holly? To get at him?’

‘No.’

‘Why her then?’

He didn’t answer, sat very upright with his hands in his lap, the way Mr Harold had probably told him to sit, the attention to detail which came with engaging the partner at a Priestgate law firm.

‘You liked Holly,’ Ferreira said. ‘Before the accident. Is that it?’

‘No.’

‘You liked her but she wasn’t interested in you because she was clever and sporty and super-popular, while you –’ Ferreira frowned slightly – ‘you weren’t any of those things, were you? She didn’t even know you existed. But then she got hurt and she wasn’t sporty and popular any more, she was just a cripple.’

Benjamin’s top lip twitched.

‘A cripple with a blog and a Twitter account and not much else in her life. You weren’t going to let her ignore you any more.’ She slapped the table and he flinched. ‘But she did. All of those hours you spent setting up fake email accounts and attacking her blog, all those stupid conversations you were having with yourself – like a mad person, Ben – and she still didn’t react. Because she didn’t care what some loser like you thought. She was out there, people still liked her. They admired her courage and intelligence. Even paralysed she was still a bigger success than you.’

Benjamin opened his mouth but Mr Harold put a hand on his arm and he stopped.

‘This is all completely unnecessary, Sergeant. Benjamin doesn’t deny commenting on the young woman’s blog so please, curtail the pop psychology.’ He turned his attention to Zigic. ‘If you wish to pursue this as a hate crime that is your right, but he has been quite clear that his actions arose out of youthful naivety and boredom. There really is nothing else for us to discuss here.’

‘Murder,’ Zigic said. ‘We’re going to discuss that.’

Harold snorted. ‘I sense somebody’s clutching at straws.’

Benjamin didn’t find it quite so amusing, though, judging by how fast the colour drained from his face.

‘You threatened Holly,’ Ferreira said. ‘You probably don’t remember exactly what you said, let me read it to you.’ She found the right piece of paper. ‘“I’ve got a hammer if you want to end it. LOL. You won’t even need to hold her down. Yeah, no fun is it? Killing some bitch who can’t fight back. Can you talk Hol? Will you scream for me?”’

He juddered where he sat, eyes flicking to the door and back again. ‘It was a joke.’

‘You think she found it funny?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think she was scared by it?’

‘No. She would have done something if she was scared,’ he said. ‘She’d have blocked me from commenting.’

Ferreira rested her chin in her palm, watched him across the table until he started to fidget and look to his solicitor for some cue how to respond. When none came he clamped his mouth tight shut.

‘How do you think your mum’s going to feel when she finds out you watched a video of a paralysed woman being raped?’

Benjamin twisted in his seat. ‘I didn’t.’

‘You watched it twelve times in a single day,’ Ferreira said. ‘A woman who was paralysed from the neck down being raped.’

‘She didn’t mind.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s not
real
.’ Benjamin leaned across the table, all elbows and hands too big for his skinny arms. ‘Everyone watches them. It’s not a crime.’

‘Benjamin is quite correct,’ Mr Harold said, but he suddenly looked a tad uneasy.

Odd for a man who’d defended more than his fair share of sex offenders and murderers. It was Ben’s age, though, Ferreira thought. Just as they all felt a little worse about the young victims they felt a little more disgusted by the young perpetrators. Innocence taken was disturbing enough, but innocence absent challenged the notions of justice and morality which brought them into work every morning.

‘In itself, what Benjamin did isn’t illegal,’ Zigic said. ‘But the fact that he watched the video twelve times in one day and on a daily basis from then on, makes us wonder what kept drawing him back to it.’

Benjamin was becoming visibly agitated, leg jiggling under the table, hands clasped tight on top of it. Ferreira could see his pulse beating at his temple, all of the blood rushing fast to his brain. Zigic unnerved him, she realised. Against their expectations he was the one Ben didn’t want to deal with. She sat back in her chair, giving him the cue.

‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘You watched that video – dozens of times – and you thought about Holly, in her bed, unable to move. She wouldn’t be able to stop you. Just like that woman couldn’t stop the man who raped her.’

‘I didn’t touch her!’

‘No, Dawn got in the way, didn’t she?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ Benjamin said, a childish whine that threatened to erupt into a wail. ‘I never went anywhere near either of them.’

‘You never went to Dawn’s house?’

‘No.’

Zigic slipped the photograph of Dawn’s vandalised car out of the file. ‘Then how did you manage to take this photo you sent to Holly?’

He stared at it for a few long seconds. ‘I saw it when I was walking past the house, so I took a photo.’

‘Where were you walking from?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘There’s nothing at that end of the village. Unless you were planning on walking the five miles into Peterborough. And somehow I doubt that.’ Zigic tapped the photo. ‘No, I think you sprayed the car and I think you slashed the tyres.’

‘Can you prove any of this?’ Mr Harold asked.

‘We’re not interested in charging Ben with a petty act of vandalism,’ Zigic told him. ‘We want to know when he was last at Dawn’s house.’

‘I’ve never been there,’ Benjamin said again and caught himself. ‘Except that time. When I was walking past and I saw the car.’

‘And where were you during the evening of Thursday the tenth of September?’

‘Last Thursday?’ the boy asked. ‘At home. It’s a school night. Warren was there too, he’ll tell you.’

Zigic smiled. ‘We’ve already had Warren’s version of events. If you’re looking for an alibi you need to look elsewhere.’

‘I’d like some time to speak with my client,’ Mr Harold said.

‘Certainly. If you think it’ll help.’

By six the search team was finished at the kennels, no knife found, no bloodstained clothing, and Zigic reluctantly released Benjamin on police bail, into his mother’s care. She’d spent the hours he was in custody waiting in reception and when Zigic took Benjamin back to her she looked tired out and disgusted by what she’d seen pass through there during the afternoon.

‘I knew this was a mistake,’ she said, trying to take her son’s hand.

He pulled away from her, not wanting to appear weak in front of the young man being dragged through the main doors by two heavyset uniforms.

‘It wasn’t a mistake,’ Zigic told her. ‘Ben has been charged with harassment and he’ll be tried for it. How much further he went remains to be seen.’

‘He didn’t kill anyone.’ She hustled him towards the door and he was out and gone when she turned back to Zigic. ‘You shouldn’t believe anything Warren says. He hated Dawn for the way she was using Holly against him. I’ve lost count of the number of times he said he wished she was dead.’

She lingered, waiting for him to ask her more, but he didn’t.