Irrefutable Evidence: A Crime Thriller (12 page)

Her voice was rising as her rage started to get the better of her.

“Didn’t you once stop to think of the waves you’d be creating, or that your secret wouldn’t eventually be discovered? Thank God we found out now. If it had happened during trial, we’d never have recovered.”

She stopped to take a slow and deliberate breath, and then continued in a more even voice.

“I’m also going to report this to the Internal Investigation Branch, and knowing them, they’ll have your hide. I can’t imagine anyone here will stand in their way. For the present, DC Cotton, I should warn you that you are not to breathe a word of any of this to anyone, inside or outside the team. If you do, I’ll make it my personal business to ensure you are kicked out of the force in disgrace. Now, get out of my sight.”

Jennifer was shaking. She lowered her head and shifted her eyes from Freneton to Hawkins, and then to Hurst. Benign, friendly Mike Hurst. He was her mentor, more than any of the others, and now he hated her for something that must be untrue, and if it wasn’t, something that she had still had no knowledge of.

All she could perceive in their eyes now was hostility. She realised her chin was quivering more than the rest of her. They were not going to see her break down and cry. She turned swiftly on her heel and without even a glance at McPherson, who had to step smartly out of her way, she pulled open the office door and left.

She was hardly conscious of walking along the corridor and into the squad room. As the door slammed behind her, she became aware of every pair of eyes in the room watching her, but she couldn’t look at any of them, not even Derek. She grabbed her bag from where she’d left it on her desk on the way through and rushed out of the door.

Derek Thyme watched her go. He was as alarmed and confused as the rest of them — they’d all been listening to the yelling, shouting and arguing from the inner sanctum all morning. He looked across at one of the other DCs, Joe Renton, one of the older ones. Not over bright, but steady and reliable. Renton caught his eye and nodded after Jennifer.

“What you waiting for, Justin? You’re her mate; go after her, find out what the hell’s up.”

Derek shot out of the room and caught up with Jennifer on a half landing on the stairs. She heard him coming but ignored him.

He grabbed her arm. “Jennifer. Jen. What’s happened? Are you OK? I’ve never seen any of them so angry. Not even the Ice Queen and she’s always angry. McPherson was apoplectic; I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”

Jennifer stopped and half-turned towards him.

“I can’t tell you, Derek. They’ve forbidden me.”

She had a sudden thought that if what she’d been told was true, they had no right to ban her from announcing who her father was. But then the thought of how that would be received hit her.

“All I can say is that I’ve been suspended. They want to prosecute me, Derek.”

“What! Why? What’ve you done? That’s rubbish; they can’t do that. I don’t believe it.”

“Look, Derek, it’s better we don’t even skirt around it. I can’t say anything, Nothing. No hints. They’re bound to question you when you go back and even if they haven’t seen you follow me, they will still question you as part of their investigation. You’re a close colleague; they’re bound to.”

“Question me about what? I don’t get it, Jennifer. Anyway, if they’re going to question me, they’ll tell me what it’s about so you might as well tell me now. Won’t make any difference.”

“Yes, Derek, it will. Let them tell you if they want and then let them swear you to secrecy until the press gets hold of it. For my part, I can’t and I don’t want to even come close to opening up the possibility of you being in any way complicit.”

Derek stared at her, trying to work his way through the complexity of her sentence. He gave up and took hold of her shoulders.

“Jennifer, whatever they’re accusing you of, I don’t, can’t believe that you’ve done something wrong. You’ve got a brilliant mind — I’m in awe of you — and you’re going to make a great detective. It gives me a buzz just working alongside you, even though I know I can never be as good as you are.”

She touched his arm and sagged.

“Thank you, Derek, you’re very sweet. It’s good to know I’ve got one friend here.”

“You’ve got more than one, Jennifer. The whole team feels the same.”

Jennifer pulled open her bag and snatched out a tissue. She could feel tears welling up in her eyes.

She managed to stall them and wipe her nose.

“Look,” she sniffed, “you’ve got to watch your back. You all have. Freneton will take no prisoners.”

She stopped and looked at the ground, suddenly overwhelmed again.

Derek was still not taking no for an answer.

“Jennifer, you’ve got to tell me.”

She looked up at him but hardly saw him, her mind working overtime. She suddenly let go of his arm and ran back up the stairs, leaving Derek staring after her with his mouth open.

She banged open the door to the squad room, strode through and into the corridor beyond. Hurst was back in his office talking to McPherson. Jennifer pushed open the door without knocking and marched up to Hurst while totally ignoring McPherson. She hadn’t forgiven him.

“What the hell are you doing here, Cotton? You’ve been suspended.” Hurst was shocked and distinctly uncomfortable. The Ice Queen might emerge from under her rock at any moment and accuse him of collaborating with the enemy.

“You’ve been ordered to leave. Any time you spend near this case is compromising it further.”

Jennifer ignored his rant. “Boss, I want another DNA profile done on me. I think there’s been some enormous screw-up. There’s no other explanation. What they think is my DNA can’t possibly be. There’s no way that man can be my father.”

Hurst took a deep breath as he thought about it. Finally he nodded. “That’s a fair request, Jennifer, but I hope for your sake, for all our sakes, that you’re right.”

He looked at McPherson. “Rob, take her back to the squad room and get someone to take a buccal swab from her, witnessed. Then get the sample to the lab and get it fast-tracked. I need that result asap.”

He turned back to Jennifer.

“After that’s done, DC Cotton, get out of here and don’t come back until you hear from me.”

C
hapter 16

L
ate the following afternoon, Jennifer was at home in her apartment unable to concentrate on anything, her mind still spinning around the meeting with her senior officers the day before. She had spent the past twenty-four hours racking her brains for any indication in her past that her being Henry Silk’s daughter could possibly be true. If only she could ask her mother, but she couldn’t.

A cardboard box on the coffee table in front of her was full of old family photographs she had selected from several much bigger boxes stored at the family house outside Milan when she moved to the apartment in Nottingham. There were many of her as a baby and a small child, either alone or with her mother and Pietro, joyful images from holidays in the sun and the snow, the house in Sardinia, various yachts, fashion shows, parties. There were also many Jennifer had selected of her mother as a child with her own parents. Jennifer had never known them; they died before she was born. She remembered thinking it slightly odd at the time that there were none of her mother from around her mid-teens until when she was twenty-three and holding the newborn baby Jennifer in her arms. Now she found it more than odd: there was a distinct gap.

She was idly flicking through the photos when her main gate buzzer sounded through the intercom. Whoever it was had held their finger on the button for too long: it wasn’t a casual caller.

She sighed, reached over to the handset and pressed a button.

“Yes?”

“It’s Rob McPherson. We need to talk.”

Jennifer considered telling him to go away, that he was the last person she wanted to talk to. Instead, she pressed the gate release button.

“It’s flat three,” she said, pressing the door release for her apartment. “The door’s on the left.”

She heard the front door close and McPherson’s footsteps as he came up the stairs.

“In here,” she called through to the hallway at the top of the stairs. She wasn’t going to get up and greet him.

McPherson appeared at the door, his eyes automatically scanning the room, the detective in him noting its important features.

Jennifer indicated an armchair opposite to where she was sitting and he sat down.

“Nice place,” he said absently, although his eyes had now settled on the box of photographs.

“Thanks, but I doubt you’ve come here to view the property.”

He looked up, his square jaw set, his eyes troubled.

“The lab has profiled the sample you gave yesterday, Jennifer, and it’s the same result. Hurst also got them to repeat Silk’s profiling. There’s been no cock-up: all the profiles match the previous ones. They are sticking by their opinion that Henry Silk is your father.”

Jennifer leaned forward, putting her head in her hands, her eyes staring blankly. She was gutted. She’d pinned her hopes on a mix-up of samples.

McPherson waited until she looked in his direction.

“Hurst is spitting; he thought you were right. Freneton is giving him hell — they hate each other, as you are probably aware. Look, Jennifer, I need some background from you. Could you tell me something of your childhood, your family? Tell me about your mother, what she told you about your father. If you want us to believe your story, we’ve got to have something to go on.”

Jennifer stood and walked over to the balcony doors. In Lincoln Circus below, she could see two children of about three and five playing with a ball, giggling, laughing, calling out to their parents who were laughing and waving back. An ordinary, normal family, a family whose lives hadn’t just been shattered, people who would go home, enjoy their evening meal, watch TV, read to the kids.

She felt like screaming, tearing her hair, beating her fists on McPherson’s head.

She turned to face him, leaning against the French doors. He was watching her carefully.

“Jennifer,” he started, “about yesterday. You must have thought I was doing the dirty on you, telling tales.”

“Weren’t you?”

“She gave me no choice, the Ice Queen, I mean. She’s like a Rottweiler. I’ve had some tough bosses in my time, but she takes the biscuit. But I wanted to say that I’m sorry. It was nothing personal. When she hit me with the DNA results, she made it sound like the end of the world. A huge conspiracy on your part.”

Jennifer nodded vaguely and walked slowly to the sofa. She sat, pulling one leg up under her.

“What do you want to know?”

“Can someone talk to your mother? She’s still alive, I take it?”

Her reply was a caustic snort. “Yes, she’s very much alive and you’re welcome to talk to her. But I don’t think it will help you.”

“Why?”

“She’s in a care home in Milan, a psychiatric care home. She’s suffering from a severe form of early onset dementia. She doesn’t know what day it is, and most of the time she doesn’t know who I am, let alone anyone else. So good luck.”

She folded her arms and looked away.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Jennifer. That’s terrible. How old is she?”

“Forty-eight.”

“Jesus. Milan you say?”

“I told you the other day I was brought up in Italy, in fact, I was born there. But I went to quite a smart international school and in many ways I consider myself as British as you are. Not that being Italian would be a problem for me. Once I’d decided that I wanted to be a police officer, a detective, in fact — much to my mother’s horror, and my stepfather’s — I thought seriously about joining the Italian police. But there are too many police forces there, mostly in competition with one another, and they’re all extremely male oriented. I couldn’t see a future, so I chose to come to England. I was at university here and it seemed the logical way to go.”

“Yeah,” said McPherson, “I can appreciate that, the male-oriented bit, I mean. I watch Montalbano on the telly, even though I have to read the subtitles. Not too many female detectives in that.”

Jennifer smiled. “Once in a while I have to resort to the subtitles too, even though my Italian’s fluent. It’s set in Sicily, as you know, and they use the Sicilian dialect sometimes, which is difficult.”

McPherson could sense she was relaxing slightly. “Tell me about your background.”

“As I said, I was born in Milan some months after my mother moved there in 1988. She’d previously worked as a fashion designer in a small fashion house in London.

“She was engaged to a doctor, Simon Jefford. According to her, he was a real looker and wonderful with it, and he seemed to get more so in my mother’s memory as the years went by. She had a difficult time at my birth; she nearly died and the doctors advised her to have no more children. But I’m jumping ahead.

“Before I was born, in November eighty-eight, back in the summer of that year, Simon Jefford, who had recently qualified, wanted to go on a drive around Europe with his mates, two of his closest friends. It was something they’d talked about and planned to do all the way through medical school. Just three blokes: girl friends and fiancées weren’t invited.

“So off they went in a VW camper and trundled around Europe. But there was an accident in what was then still Yugoslavia. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, outside Belgrade, there was a head-on collision with a huge truck driven by some drunk. It was nighttime and he veered across the road, wiping out the van and killing all three of them.

“Apparently my mother had a breakdown, nearly lost me a couple of times, blamed the whole thing on pretty much everyone and everything she could. She decided she hated England, London in particular — she’s half Italian, did I mention that? She sold up, moved to Milan and got a job in what even then was quite a prestigious fashion house. That’s where she met my stepfather, Pietro Fabrelli.”

“The Pietro Fabrelli? Even a fashion caveman like me’s heard of him.”

“Yes.”

“Blimey, you kept that quiet.”

Jennifer shrugged. Her attitude was that it was no one else’s business and anyway she hated name-dropping. She’d told HR; that was as far as it needed to go.

“He fell for her and they married. Of course, they couldn’t have children, but he always treated me like his daughter. However, he didn’t adopt me, so I kept my mother’s name.”

“Which is …”

“Cotton. She’s Antonella Cotton. Her name was originally Italian, Cotone, but she changed it in England and never changed it back.”

“So she’s actually Antonella Fabrelli, then.”

“No. Married women in Italy don’t take their husband’s family name, only the kids. In my case, as I said, I was a stepdaughter, so I kept the name Cotton.”

McPherson sat back in his chair, feeling more at ease as the conversation progressed.

“You know, Jennifer, I’m inclined to believe you. It all sounds pretty convincing.”

“Of course it’s convincing; it’s the bloody truth!” she snapped. “Do you think I’m making it all up?”

“No, sorry, that didn’t come out right. But what I don’t understand is how, if your mother was expecting you, Jefford would—”

Jennifer interrupted him. “Go off on a jolly?”

“Yes.”

Jennifer’s expression was wistful. “One of her great regrets in life was that he never even knew she was pregnant. She wanted to wait until he returned before she told him; reckoned he wouldn’t have gone if she had, and she knew how much the trip meant to him.”

“Yes, but he wasn’t your father, clearly, so what was her relationship with Henry Silk?”

“I’ve no idea; I wish I had. Ever since the big revelation yesterday I’ve been trawling through every memory I can muster for something. I certainly never heard her mention his name, and living in Italy, we didn’t watch British TV, so I’d never heard of him until I came here as a student and saw Runway.”

She picked up some of the photos and flicked absently through them before tossing them back on the table.

“Listen, if you believe me—”

McPherson shook his head. “I said ‘inclined to believe you’ not that I did.”

“Whatever. But if you were
inclined
to think that I genuinely didn’t know, then if that’s true, I can’t possibly have compromised the case, can I? And what about Silk, I assume he has no idea that I’m his daughter. I mean, why should he?”

“Why indeed, and I doubt we’ll be telling him. But regarding compromising the case, it’s not that easy, as I think you realise. Even if you didn’t know, the fact remains that you are Henry Silk’s daughter, which places the whole investigation on difficult ground. And whatever we say, there will be plenty of people who don’t believe us.

“As both Freneton and Hawkins explained, it’s a loophole, a bloody embarrassing big one. Everyone will get egg on their faces. Imagine the headlines: ‘TV Star Prostitute Killer Arrested By His Own Daughter Scandal/Farce/Fiasco — make that final word whatever you like. They’ll have quotes from Human Rights Watch, Opposition MPs, anyone they can wheel out. Sky will feature it ad nauseam.”

Jennifer shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do about that; it’s not my problem. And I should imagine that too many people know already for it to be kept quiet.”

“Why? Have you told anybody?” snapped McPherson, his sharp response surprising her.

“No, of course not, not even Derek Thyme, though he badgered me hard enough. Believe me, I was within a whisker of telling him after the way Freneton spoke to me, but I didn’t.”

McPherson wasn’t letting it go.

“The only people who know at the moment are you, me, Hurst, Freneton and Hawkins, together with a few people at the lab,” he said sternly. “They’ve been told that it’s classified, completely confidential, so they won’t blab. The DCS will have to tell the assistant chief constable, who will, of course, go ballistic.”

“What happens now?”

“I don’t know. Do you think your stepfather knows the truth?”

Jennifer thought about it for a moment, then shook her head.

“No, I very much doubt it. He’s always been completely open and considerate in talking about Simon Jefford; he knows how my mother felt about him. I think there would have been an edge if he’d known the truth. But what I meant was what happens now to me?”

As he leaned forward, McPherson’s whole body language changed. They’d reached the difficult part. He wasn’t now simply her guv; he was the messenger sent with bad news.

“Freneton wants you transferred out of SCF, probably back into uniform, somewhere out of the way.”

Jennifer ground her teeth. “Like Newark, where I started?” she snarled.

“I’ve no idea; it’s not my call. How come you started off there anyway, and not somewhere down south?”

“Why should I be down south? I was at Nottingham Uni, the original one, not Trent, and I applied to the Notts Force. I like the city and know it well. Seemed logical.”

“Yes, but why Newark?”

“I’ll admit that was a total surprise. There was a bit of a crisis there at the time — they were very short-handed. So I think I was posted by a computer.

“But guv, I really don’t want to go back into uniform. I mean, they do a fantastic job and all that, a really difficult one at times and I have nothing but admiration for them, but it’s not why I joined the force. My career is in CID. If I’m back in uniform, that’s my career down the tubes through no fault of my own. You know how it will work. I’ll be branded.”