Dead Unlucky (31 page)

‘Good morning,’ pronounced Hart as he stood on the doorstep side by side with Asha Kanjaria. The coldness of his voice and the grimness of his face actually stated that the beginning of the day was anything but good, not even verging on half-decent. ‘May we come in?’

‘I suppose I can’t really say no, but why you have to drag me out of bed at this hour to ask questions I’ve answered a thousand times already, I’ve no idea.’ A pair of rubbed eyes peered into the early morning with distaste. ‘It’s still dark out.’ The front door shut and they walked into the small living room in silence.

‘I’ve not come here to ask you any questions, Ms Rand. I’ve come to arrest you for murdering Nicola Brown.’ Before she could break her horrified silence with a hackneyed protest drenched with indignation, Hart continued. ‘You’ll need to change out of your dressing gown before we take you to the police station.’

The clicking of an opening door at the end of the short hallway was followed by a familiar voice announcing itself. ‘Who’s that, Sophie, banging on the door at this time of the morning? Whoever it is, he’ll be out on his ear.’

Immediately Darren Redpath’s eyes came into view, above a body concealed only by a white towel around its waist, Hart’s own gaze bore into them like a pair of six inch nails. ‘Get changed. Get to the station. And do it now.’ Redpath spun around and fled to retreat out of the range of those spikes.

Sophie Rand started after her boyfriend as he made his way back to their bedroom. Hart barked at her. ‘Wait until he’s gone before you get changed yourself. Sit down.’

She tried to regain her poise and began the process of denial. ‘I don’t know how you think you can pin that on me. I suppose you can’t find the real culprit, so you think I’ll do.’

‘I’m pinning this on you because you strung up a seventeen-year-old girl to die. More than that, instead of killing her quickly, you let her stand on the side of a bath for hours with a rope around her neck while she knew she was going to be pushed off and hanged. Just so it would look like suicide.’ Before he had knocked on the front door, Hart had promised to keep himself calm, but his anger was boiling and he almost shouted. ‘And hanged by the person who was meant to be looking after her. You, her teacher and the person trusted with taking care of those girls.’ He recovered himself and quietened his voice, so there was a chill when he asked, ‘What did you feel when you looked into her terrified pleading eyes and nudged her to her death? How could you still go through with it?’

Sophie Rand adopted a simultaneously defensive but aggressive pose, like a cornered cat with its claws out. ‘I’m going to sue you for talking trash like that. What makes you think you can come round my flat and accuse me of that sort of stuff? Why are you saying it was me anyway?’

‘You made a mistake going to Patricia Luft’s party with Darren Redpath. I had wondered why he detested Paul Outbridge so much, why he kept telling me to pull him in for murdering Nicola. You fed him those lines, didn’t you? Just like you used Mr Outbridge’s handcuffs, and stuck a few of his cat’s hairs on the rope and on Nicola’s clothes in case the suicide trick didn’t come off. Geeky Paul Outbridge can go down for life. Who cares?’

‘A great theory, but one that won’t put me in court. Especially for something I didn’t do.’ Hope was returning. If that was all he had, maybe she really
could
sue him.

‘No, that won’t put you away. It’s the fibres that will do that. The fibres from your green pullover.’ Sophie Rand’s insolent stare challenged him to continue. ‘Fibres from a green pullover were found on Nicola’s night clothes. A green jumper similar to the one you wore at camp in August, similar to the one you were wearing when Hiba Massaoud called you after she found her friend’s body.’

‘Exactly. So that’s how they got onto her clothes.’ Hart ignored the jutting of her upper body towards him as she spoke, making the unuttered statement that he was stupid.

‘The same jumper you wore when you chloroformed Nicola and carried her to the bathroom. Of course, it made good sense to wear exactly the same clothes again when you arrived with that manufactured shock in the morning. But, you see, those fibres are heavy around the middle of Nicola’s own nightdress, just as they would be if she was clasped over a person’s shoulder. And prominent around the back, where she had an arm wrapped around her as she was being carried. Elsewhere, there are far fewer. Of course, you won’t have that jumper any more. But identical fibres will be found in this flat. In your car. In your school apartment.’

‘You’re still forgetting something. Something a bit obvious.’ She shifted her body forward again but, despite her words, with less confidence this time. ‘I was bound to get stuff from my jumper on her clothes. It was me that lifted her into the bath when Hiba untied the rope.’

‘Yes, you did. That would have been a prudent move. Except you bottled it. This wasn’t the same unconscious but living girl you’d slung over your shoulder a few hours before. This was a corpse that had been hanging dead half the night. Nicola’s clothes were soiled. She smelt awful. Her tongue was hanging out, her dead eyes were gazing down at the floor, stuck to a drooping head unsupported by a limp neck, and her limbs were blue. A witness says you held her under her armpits at arm’s length to lay her in that bath; no way did you fancy tangling with the mess you had created. Those areas of heavy fibre residues could only have been deposited on Nicola’s clothes when you put her up, not when you took her down.’

Redpath had tiptoed back into the room and stood there clutching an overnight bag; a ridiculous, bumbling figure. ‘Sorry, Sir. I’ll see you back at the station then, Sir.’

As he moved towards the front door, he heard a shout behind him. ‘Don’t come back. You can’t really think I enjoyed having an arrogant pig in my bed.’ And then to Hart. ‘He thinks he’s God’s gift. It would have been marginally less revolting sleeping with you.’

*****

Even during the fairly lengthy span of Hart’s career, it was unusual to wrap up two cases of murder on the same day. But, just as no two victims are identical, their killers also are constructed from different mental components, their evil plunging to differing depths. So it was with sadness rather than a sense of fulfilment in a job well done that Hart paid a second visit of the morning to another household which should have dreaded his knock on the door. He was surprised by the welcome he received.

‘You’ve come to tell me you’ve found Nicola’s murderer!’ exclaimed a hopeful voice as the door was pulled open.

‘We probably have, but –’

‘That’s wonderful news! The best news anybody could hope for! I’m so excited I don’t think I’ll stop celebrating for a month!' The thrilled tremor in the voice lowered itself to a tone of conspiracy. ‘Who did it? Who was the beast who killed Nicola? Was it Sebastian? I knew it was.’

‘Paul,’ began Hart after reaching the tidy living room and setting his hands on the back of a chair littered with a smattering of cat’s hairs, ‘you know I didn’t come here to tell you that. I’ve come to take you away for killing Sebastian Emmer.’

‘Christmas has come late for me this year. You’ve brought me the best present I could have hoped for!’

‘Sebastian made fun of you for having that magazine which he took, so you assumed he must have taken the handcuffs as well. That’s why you thought he had killed Nicola. That and his obvious hatred for her. And so you murdered him. Maybe you found out Ron Brown played golf when you were at his house, and it would have been easy enough to nip into that garage for the club.’ After telling Outbridge how he knew he was guilty, Hart wondered why he was bothering to argue against a denial of murder that never came.

‘But you’re not lying to me are you, Chief Inspector? You wouldn’t do that, would you? You really have found the person who did this thing to Nicola?’ Some of the excitement had metamorphosed into worry as Paul Outbridge sat down to make himself comfortable, a concern that he had misunderstood the policeman.

‘No, I’m not lying to you, Paul. It does look like we have found the person responsible.’

Paul Outbridge leaned back in his chair and smiled. He was more than content; for the first time since he had met the man, Hart saw a picture of real joy painted on his face. ‘Come on, Paul. You had better get your coat.’

‘Yes, of course,’ came the happy reply as he stood up and made his way to the kitchen. ‘I’ll just make sure Mirabelle has enough to eat before we set off.’

Arthur Rhodes wasn’t the first person to pop into Hart’s office and congratulate him on his success. And even the Chief and Commander Sturgess in their joint news conference had generously acknowledged that they didn’t deserve all of the credit themselves, that recognition should also be afforded to “other officers” who had most certainly assisted in apprehending the suspects. As Hart poured Arthur his tea, Asha Kanjaria arrived to unload some paperwork.

‘Sit yourself down, Constable,’ offered Hart, ‘and take time out for a cuppa. You’ve been involved in this affair so you’re entitled to pick over the pieces with the pair of us.’ She was unaware of the honour accorded her of being the first constable ever to be offered tea in the very room where Hart had laid a thousand cases to rest.

‘So you’re the officer who gave my friend here his Christmas dinner,’ remarked Rhodes. ‘It was a feast by all accounts, but you’ll have to have him round a few more times before he catches up with a figure to be truly proud of,’ he continued, patting his belly.

‘It won’t take too many visits with my mum’s cooking,’ said Asha.

‘Will they both get sent away?’ asked Rhodes, suddenly cramming the room with gravity.

‘Sophie Rand is still squawking about a monstrous miscarriage of justice but, yes, she’ll go down. That fleecy pullover of hers was like a logbook that located for the reader every place she had visited. And identified every teenager she’d ever slung over her shoulder to murder.’

‘Why did she do it, Sir? I mean, how could she do that to a kid?’

‘The ultimate answer is probably a simple one: she’s evil. But she thought Nicola was going to blow the gaff on her drug-taking and buying coke from a student, a kid with whom she was having an affair. Rand thought Nicola had overheard some shenanigans at that camp. She knew Nicola had made an appointment to see the Head and assumed it was to blurt out the details.’ Hart flinched. ‘She was wrong about that, of course. But if Nicola had told tales that would have finished Rand’s career and brought in the Met, too. It would have been a certain prison sentence, especially as no judge is going to cut slack for a teacher who’s into buying drugs from one of her own students and sleeping with him. It wouldn’t make her look too classy in front of family and friends either.’

‘So how did she actually do the deed?’ asked Rhodes.

‘She left the fire door on the latch and sneaked up the fire escape on the Saturday evening. Her room was only a few doors from Nicola’s and, when the girls were in bed, she got Nicola to open up. Because, of course, she could be trusted. Then she went in and killed a girl who possessed only half her strength. It would have been easy to come up behind her with a pad of chloroform. And carrying a kitbag around wouldn’t have seemed odd for a PE teacher. No one would have guessed it had a rope in it if they had bumped into her.’

Hart noted how his two visitors looked at him wistfully. ‘You’re right, I’m still angry. I’m angry because this world has lost a gem. How many lives would she have saved as a doctor? Her parents have been ripped to pieces, and nothing will ever stitch them back together. I can guess what sort of mother and wife she would have made herself, and I hope I never have to experience anything like the terror she must have suffered before she died. I
am
angry, and there would be something wrong with me if I wasn’t. Of course Rand will get a life sentence, but I hope the judge makes sure she stays inside for at least twenty-five years.’

‘What about Paul Outbridge, Harry?’ asked Arthur Rhodes, weaning his friend away from the incendiary topic of Nicola Brown. ‘Is he pretending he’s a saint as well?’

‘In a way, yes, but he’s a different creature altogether. He admits to killing Sebastian Emmer, but doesn’t see why everybody else is making such a fuss about it. He reckons he’s done the world a favour by getting rid of someone it’s better off without. Someone, what’s more, who was unkind to his beloved Nicola. In fact, he can’t stop talking about her; he doesn’t give a tinker’s curse about any murder charge.’

‘Was he a bit pervy about her then, Sir?’ asked Kanjaria with a grimace.

‘Nope, not at all. She had time for him and gave him respect, something he got very little of from the so-called friends he had fallen in with. His affection for Nicola was certainly peculiar, but it wasn’t iffy. But, apart from Sophie Rand, Outbridge was the only person who knew that Nicola had been murdered, and it was obvious to him that it had to be her perennial bully who had killed her. And Sebastian was blackmailing him. The key was, the boy knew the handcuffs used in the supposed suicide belonged to Outbridge because he had found that bondage magazine in his flat. Perhaps he had even seen the cuffs before Rand took them away during the birthday party. We’ll never know that for certain, he’s not here to tell us now, but it gave him the chance to earn a bit of extra cash.’

‘So that explains the money the boy had on him when he died,’ offered Rhodes, ‘and why Outbridge had washed his fingerprints off with alcohol before he handed it over. But I don’t see why Emmer parked his car next to Greenway Park.’

‘He was on his way to see the Browns. The day before, Sebastian had enjoyed telling Outbridge that he was going to let them know where the handcuffs used in their daughter’s suicide had come from, even though Outbridge had just handed him two hundred quid to keep his mouth shut. He was going to blab, just for fun, and remember that there was no fun for Sebastian Emmer unless it contained a huge dose of unrelenting spite. Imagine Ron and Daisy having him turn up on their doorstep with a gloating grin stretching between his ears. What exquisite revenge over his dead adversary it would have been to deliver a surprise like that to her parents. Just like Sophie Rand, Outbridge had already decided to murder his student and, like her, he also had to get to his victim before he talked. I’ve got no doubt he genuinely wanted to help Nicola’s parents, spare them from even more pain.’ Hart gave a pensive smile before continuing. ‘But Sebastian didn’t know the area where they lived. Outbridge told him there was restricted parking outside their house but pretended to let slip he could put his car in Green Drive, so making sure he cut through the alley. He was pleased to have thought that up.’

‘But if he liked Nicola so much, why fit her father up with the golf club?’ asked Rhodes.

‘He didn’t enjoy that question himself, it’s the only one that’s made him uncomfortable. But he had to get hold of a weapon quickly. And, anyway, nobody could possibly believe Nicola’s dad could commit such an act as murder so it didn’t really matter. She was perfect, and so therefore dad was close to being a god as well. Then he realised it might even help to muddy the waters. What’s more, he was sure dad wouldn’t mind lending an unwitting hand to aid him in covering his tracks. After all, it was his dead daughter Outbridge was helping.

‘As for the boots, he had no idea size eleven was the size Simon Chandler wore. He had bought a pair that size and placed pieces of wood in them so that, as he walked, the footprints looked like a genuine size eleven, far too big for Ron Brown, of course, and not like they were made by Outbridge’s size seven foot inside a size eleven boot. He was rather pleased with that little idea, too. In fact, he’s quite proud of killing Sebastian Emmer altogether and enjoys telling us about it, even though it turned out the boy didn’t murder Nicola after all. His incessant malice towards her was enough. There’s only one thing he’s bothered about.’

Kanjaria raised her eyebrows. ‘And it’s not the murder of his student?’

‘Nope. He’s still summoning up the bottle to tell his parents he bought a pair of handcuffs and some bondage mags. I reckon Paul Outbridge will be serving the first few months of his sentence in the prison hospital. But they won’t find he’s crazy. Just odd.’ Hart managed another smile. ‘Well, perhaps he straddles the boundary between madness and mere weirdness.’

Asha Kanjaria stood up and walked towards the door. ‘Thanks for letting me know the details, Sir, but if I don’t get back soon Inspector McCarthy will be filling out a missing-persons form.’ As her hand began to turn the door knob, she paused. ‘Just one thing. Do you know why Nicola made that appointment to see her headteacher?’ She thought she noticed Hart wince, and his eyes certainly became heavy and sad.

‘Even Hiba Massaoud knew nothing about Sophie Rand buying drugs from Sebastian, simply because nobody had told her. Perhaps Nicola didn’t even know herself, despite being outside the tent when Rand and Emmer were playing their little game with the bag of coke. And she had no reason to hurt Sophie Rand even if she had known what she got up to; there had never been an issue between them. In fact, she thought the world of her PE teacher. Even if they had fallen out, no way would Nicola have dropped her in it by dobbing her to the Head, because being a snitch just wasn’t her style. And she certainly wouldn’t have grassed on Rand to get back at Sebastian Emmer; that would have constituted an admission to herself and everyone else that he had really got underneath her skin.’

‘So why arrange that meeting?’ pressed Asha.

‘Nicola
had
mentioned to Hiba why she was going to see Annalee Hargreaves. She wanted to ask Hargreaves if she could use her as a referee for a job application. Nicola Brown died because she wanted to apply to do volunteer work at the Princess Royal Hospital.’

*****

Hart was right about Sophie Rand’s conviction. On a golden September day, the jury reached their unanimous conclusion after only an hour and a half of deliberation. She was guilty of murder. His further hope that she would receive a minimum tariff of twenty-five years in prison was more than fulfilled. In handing down her life sentence at Lockingham Crown Court, Her Honour Judge Elisabeth Bevan actually recommended a term of thirty years before parole should be considered. ‘The premeditated wickedness of your crime and your abuse of the position of trust you held over that young person are as vile a pair of actions as any I have encountered in all my years on the bench.’

But both Hart and the eminent judge were completely mistaken in supposing the killer would actually be incarcerated for such a lengthy spell. Sophie Rand failed to serve even one derisory day of her sentence.

There had been immense interest in the trial, and a few members of the public had even attended the proceedings every single day. One of those observers had also appeared as a witness. She was a teenage girl, expensively dressed and possessing the sartorial acumen to ensure that the money spent on her clothes was certainly not being squandered. One of her favourite items of apparel appeared to be a wide leather belt which sported a gleaming metal buckle. During their initial meetings the lady who wafted the scanner over that fastener was given to ordering the girl to remove it when the instrument beeped. As the trial proceeded, she became more amiable and simply offered a friendly smile to the charming young woman. By the last day they would take the time for a minute or two’s chat. ‘It’ll all be over today, Dear,’ she said kindly. ‘Then you can start to put this awful business behind you.’

The instant after Judge Bevan announced the punishment she deemed a fitting chastisement to atone for the murder of Nicola Brown, the teenager vaulted from the public gallery over the wooden railing, and was breathing into the defendant’s face before anybody could even think about stopping her, much less try. The stiletto blade that had been hiding underneath the belt was plunged upwards behind the prisoner’s ribcage and into the left ventricle of her heart. Within seconds, Sophie Rand’s life had drained onto the courtroom floor, lingering barely an instant to caress the handcuffs that bound her.

Until that moment, Ibrahim Massaoud’s family had been proud of their reputation of never having committed even the most trivial of crimes during their stays in any of the numerous countries to which they had been posted. If someone had suggested he would one day need to invoke diplomatic immunity on behalf of his daughter to prevent her being tried for killing her teacher, he would have found the contemptible joke to be in extremely poor taste.

There were few of the usual grumbles from the public regarding diplomats and their families getting away with murder as Hiba Massaoud boarded the plane bound for Cairo.