Sleep Tight (19 page)

‘If we assume Robert Brookes put those cameras in place and he usually switched them off when he came home, he’d know he was being filmed, wouldn’t he? He was facing the camera when he shouted her name, and he could have bought the presents just for show. I don’t think it proves anything, personally.’

Good lad, thought Tom. Exactly what he was thinking. But on the other hand, Olivia had
been there until an hour before and it would be pretty easy to check if Robert had been in his car on the way back from Newcastle in the only missing hour – the hour between Olivia being there and Robert’s arrival home.

A sudden thought struck him.

‘Becky – in that clip Olivia was making herself some coffee, wasn’t she? And she was adding milk. Didn’t you say there was no milk in the fridge, and there was no empty bottle in the dustbin?’

Becky looked at him and nodded silently.

What the hell was going on?

28

This was the sort of crime that Jumbo loved, chiefly because at the moment, nobody knew whether a crime had been committed or not, and it was his job to find out. He was delighted with the catch on the kitchen knife – his bright spark newbie had done a great job there, and the passports intrigued him too.

When you threw Gil’s discovery of the videos on the computer into the mix, and all those dreadful cameras that he’d had people climbing up and down ladders to retrieve, it was adding up to a true mystery. And there was nothing he liked better.

Now that Gil was gone, Jumbo decided to turn his attention to the study. Tom had told him that the door was usually kept locked, and he understood why. Clearly Robert Brookes had no intention of letting his wife discover that her every move was being recorded. But Jumbo had looked at the video too, and there was something that didn’t quite add up. He was sure Olivia was acting normally when she made her way around the various rooms, and there was no real sign that she was playing to the camera. In his experience, if people knew there was a camera there, they gave off signals. They behaved differently somehow, as if they were acting on a stage. There was no evidence of that with Olivia, but there were two things. She rarely showed her face – her head always seemed to be down as she walked towards the camera, but up as she walked away. And she never, ever got dressed or undressed in the bedroom. She always went into the bathroom. On one occasion, she’d clearly forgotten something and came back into the room from the bathroom to get some underwear from her drawer. But she was wearing a bathrobe. Who walks from an en suite bathroom into their own bedroom for a pair of knickers and puts a bathrobe on to do it?

He was damned sure that never happened in his house. His wife was a bit like him – big in every direction. But big of heart too, with a booming laugh that rivalled his own. Getting her to put her clothes
on
was more of an issue as she pranced around the bedroom doing her semi-naked Tina Turner impression, which she swore she practised when he wasn’t there. He smiled as he thought of her and couldn’t help comparing her, throwing back her head for a good laugh, with this Olivia Brookes woman, whose face he had yet to see in any
detail and whose laughter he had yet to hear.

He looked around the study and called one of his guys in.

‘Let’s go through the books, Adam. You know the drill. This guy strikes me as a sneaky little shit, so it would be good to know if anything’s odd about his reading, or if there’s anything stuck between the pages of his books. Let’s see how we go. Get Phil in to help. I’m going to make a start on the luminol in the rooms we’ve already finished looking at. You okay with that?’

Looking through a bookcase full of paperbacks wasn’t a highlight in anybody’s day, but it had to be done. He thumped Adam on the shoulder. ‘Good lad – it shouldn’t take you too long.’

Where to begin with the luminol? That was the question. It didn’t help that it was June, so not great in terms of making a room dark enough. But the kids’ rooms had blackout blinds, so they were as good a place to start as any, and the en suite didn’t have any windows at all so that would be another.

‘Let’s get this show on the road,’ he boomed, to nobody in particular.

It was about an hour later that he heard a shout from downstairs.

‘Jumbo, you need to see this.’ It was Phil, the technician helping Adam.

‘Two minutes and I’ll be with you, Phil,’ he shouted through the open door.

The luminol hadn’t revealed a trace of anything. All the bedrooms were now done; even the master bedroom, which fortunately had some very heavy curtains to block out the afternoon sunlight.

He thudded down the stairs, his heavy tread making them creak probably for the first time in their history, and stood in the doorway of the study.

‘What’ve you got, lads?’ he asked. Anybody under forty was a lad to Jumbo.

Adam pointed to the back of the bookcase.

‘This looks like just a normal plywood backing, but when we took the books out, we noticed one corner seemed loose so we gave it a bit of a tug. There’s a small space behind that’s been lined with wood to make a concealed area. It’s about thirty by forty centimetres and maybe eight centimetres deep. Unfortunately it’s empty, but nevertheless, a hidey hole. It looks as if the books in front have been moved recently too. There are faint dust marks where the books have been dragged to one side.’ Adam pointed to the marks. ‘Very recent, I’d say.’

‘Well done – all photographed and documented, I presume?’ he asked, already knowing the answer. ‘What the hell was he hiding in there, then? Pity he didn’t have his cameras going when he emptied it – that might have helped a bit. Anything of interest in the books?’

Adam shook his head.

‘Sorry, Jumbo. The only thing Phil and I noticed is that he seems to have a bit of a thing about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. He’s got quite a lot of books about them, but not on any other serial killers. Strange to be only interested in the one, don’t you think?’

‘I presume you weren’t born and brought up in Manchester, lad. The moors murders isn’t a story that’s ever been allowed to die around here – if you’ll excuse the poor choice of words. With one kid never found, every person for miles around knows the whole gruesome tale. So, I’d like to say it was odd, but I don’t particularly think it is.’

He looked around, and could see that everything else seemed to be finished in this room. All the papers had been boxed up to be taken away, and Gil had already moved the computer.

‘How’s about we try to get this room dark, and let’s have a lookie with the luminol, shall we?’ he said.

The study had both Venetian blinds and curtains. It seemed that Robert didn’t want anybody to be able to look through the downstairs window into this room even in daylight.

While the guys were getting the room ready, Jumbo stepped back into the hallway and saw a couple of people walking downstairs, laden with boxes.

‘What have we got here, lads?’ he asked.

‘Stuff from the loft,’ one of them answered, definitely not a lad, but very difficult to tell in their coveralls. ‘There’s some clothes and other bits and pieces, but we thought this box might be interesting. It’s got loads of old papers and documents – seem to be scientific – and then there are all sorts of odds and ends too. A scarf, a picture frame, a pair of gloves, an old programme from a Manchester United match. But the box has “Dan” scrawled on it, and the name on the documents is Danush Jahander, so as he appears to be a person of interest I thought we should go through it properly.’

‘Good job.’ Jumbo beamed. ‘We’re going to check out the study for blood now; there’s nothing upstairs. Then we’ll move into the rest of the downstairs rooms. Catch you in a few minutes.’

Jumbo returned to the darkened room and prepared himself, pulling his mask into place. He looked around him through the shadows cast by a thin beam of light that was getting in through the partially opened door. That was okay – he needed to choose his spot, then he would close the door. He thought for a moment, and then kicked the door shut behind him, pointing his spray at the carpet in the corner of the room. Nothing. He tried another couple of likely spots. Again, no result.

He turned to face the door: six panelled and painted in white gloss. He sprayed, stopped, then sprayed some more. He could feel his heart begin to hammer under his ribs.

‘Shit. We’ve got a hit.’ In the dark of the room, Jumbo pulled down his mask and stared at the door and wall, glowing blue from a height of close to six feet down to the ground.

*

Tom looked around the incident room and he could practically feel the adrenaline pumping through the bodies of this team. They had found blood – and a lot of it. According to Jumbo, the blood had been thoroughly cleaned up with bleach, but before cleaning it had soaked into the wall on either side of the door sufficiently to show a kind of spatter pattern, enough to suggest that this was an adult who had been attacked, not a child. It was too high and, from the shape of the drops, they could tell the blood was falling as it hit the wall, not rising. Jumbo said he would put money on it being arterial blood, and in his opinion there was too much for one person to lose and still be alive.

The clean-up job had been good, and bleach would have destroyed any and all DNA in the scrubbed areas. But in Jumbo’s experience, blood spatter like this spread droplets that were not easy to see with the naked eye, and he was confident that they would find a trace somewhere. Nobody ever managed to eradicate every single drop.

So much new information, but no idea where it was all heading. And still nobody had a clue where Robert had gone, or what he was doing for transport. And his mobile wasn’t giving them any clues either. He had used his credit cards before they had realised he was missing, and there had been no activity since. An all-ports warning had been issued, but nothing had come through yet. They were organising a press release, now, because Robert Brookes had to be tracked down.

Finding the blood had definitely had an impact on the team. In some cases, sadly it had raised their level of excitement. But for him it was with a sense of sorrow that he had to accept the fact that something terrible had happened in that room.

Becky was sitting with the heels of her hands propping up her forehead, her fingers gripping her thoroughly tangled fringe.

‘I know it’s what I thought all along, Tom, but it doesn’t always feel that great to be right.’

‘You’re pretty certain about this, aren’t you?’

Becky leaned across the desk towards him, eager to make him see her point. ‘We know Robert tried to take the kids a couple of years ago, whatever nonsense he spouted about his wife knowing all about it. We know that he’s been watching her, waiting for his moment. She’s been hiding passports. All sorts of stuff has been going on. I reckon he’s gone to pick up the kids from wherever he’s got them stashed. He’ll be off to start his new life.’

Tom wasn’t convinced. Would he really have killed his wife to get the children? Maybe
he’d killed them too, or were they locked away somewhere?

Resting his chin on his fist, he looked at Becky and debated whether to comment. She had said all along that Olivia was dead, and she could well be right.

‘The blood could be Robert’s, you know,’ he said, knowing what the reaction would be.

‘
What
?’ Where did
that
theory come from?’

Tom had to admit that it wasn’t really a theory, but maybe Robert hadn’t gone missing on Saturday night. Maybe
he
had been killed and his body disposed of? It was a possibility. He hated to say this, but it looked as if that terrace was going to have to come up after all.

Nothing was making sense. Olivia had been there in the house until an hour before Robert had returned home. Had he really had time to kill her, dispose of the body and do God knows what with the children before he called the police a few hours later?

Becky was looking at him as if he’d grown horns, and he was waiting for the next onslaught. Fortunately her phone interrupted the increasingly tense moment.

‘Bugger,’ Becky muttered.

Tom couldn’t resist a brief grin as she picked up the phone.

‘DI Robinson,’ she answered, clearly trying to sound chirpier than she felt. ‘Yes, Gil. What can I do for you?’

Tom could hear no more of the conversation, but Becky started to click on her keyboard.

‘Okay, got it. Now what?’ she asked. Even from where Tom was sitting he could hear a little whoop of glee from the other end of the phone, and Becky hung up.

‘Gil’s ecstatic about his latest brilliance. He’s mailed me a video segment to look at. And then when we don’t understand it, he’s going to come up and show us what he means.’

Tom rolled his eyes. ‘Why can’t the little prima donna just tell us, for Christ’s sake? This isn’t a TV quiz show – it’s a bloody murder enquiry.’

Tom saw Becky’s head whip up. It was the first time anybody had actually uttered those words, although it was what they had all been thinking. And now he’d endorsed their thoughts. Well, it was probably time to formally acknowledge it, even without a body.

Without another word, he made his way round to Becky’s side of the desk and leaned over her shoulder.

‘What are we looking at?’ he asked.

‘It’s the video from the house. Robert’s secret pictures,’ Becky said, scorn and disgust dripping from her tongue. ‘They don’t look any different to me than they did this morning.’

‘What’s the other file he’s sent you?’ Tom asked.

‘More of the same, I think. The time stamp is two months ago, though.’

Becky clicked to open the other video.

‘Fast forward it, Becky,’ Tom asked. Something was flickering at the edge of his consciousness.

‘Open the other one too. Can you run them side by side?’ he asked.

‘On this computer?’ Becky scoffed. ‘You have to be joking. Only if you want frame by frame with a two-second gap between. Why?’

‘Just take me to the kitchen scenes, then.’

At that moment, the double doors were both thrust open by a grinning Gil, making an entrance.