Splinter the Silence (17 page)

‘I wasn’t expecting to see you today,’ she said, her voice neutral.

‘No, I don’t suppose you were,’ Brandon said, his lugubrious face breaking into a smile.

‘Not that I’m not pleased to see you. But why are you here?’ Carol pulled out a chair opposite Brandon and sat down. Tony hovered for a moment, then chose a seat between the two of them, on the third side of the table. In case an umpire became necessary.

Brandon leaned back in his chair. ‘Think of me as your fairy godmother. If you want to take a chance on what I’m offering, all of this unpleasantness will go away.’

‘What do you mean, “go away”? It was a righteous arrest. I’ve gone through the system. Been processed and spat out at the other end. How can that go away? It’s all on the record.’

Brandon fiddled with his watch strap. He wasn’t as comfortable with this as he wanted them to think, Tony decided. ‘Carol has a point,’ he said. ‘It’s not like nobody knows what happened to her. The police are gossip central, you know that.’

Brandon nodded graciously. ‘Of course I do. That’s why the news that Carol was tested with a faulty breathalyser machine will also spread like wildfire. Carol and three other people who were also victims of the wrongly calibrated breathalyser will all have their arrests quashed. No further action.’ He paused, then said, ‘If you agree to what we want from you.’

Tony imagined Carol felt as stunned as he did but she showed nothing. ‘Whatever it is, you must want it very badly to be willing to pervert the course of justice, John. I always had you down as an honest copper.’

Brandon winced. ‘That’s how I like to think of myself, Carol. But what we have in mind for you is more important than making a criminal of you over this.’

‘I was driving under the influence of alcohol. I could have killed someone.’ There was no defiance in her voice, merely a bald statement of fact.

‘You drove for less than three miles on an empty country road. I’ve seen you drinking, and I suspect that at that level of blood alcohol, you were driving perfectly adequately.’ Brandon shrugged and spread his hands. ‘It’s right down the bottom of the scale.’

‘It’s still a criminal offence.’

Brandon sighed. ‘Do you want to martyr yourself, Carol? Or do you want to play your one and only get-out-of-jail-free card?’

‘You say there are three other people caught up in this?’

Brandon nodded. ‘Arrested by the same officers in the course of their shift.’

‘So they’ll all have had second breathalysers and possibly blood tests that back up what happened out there at the roadside,’ she said.

Brandon looked as if he wasn’t quite sure where she was headed with that. ‘Yes.’

‘And you think they’re not going to think it’s a bit strange for the charges to be dropped because the first breathalyser was faulty? Fruit of the poisoned tree isn’t a legal principle in this country, unless they’ve changed the law since I was working the streets.’

Brandon shrugged. ‘You know it’s the CPS policy not to pursue cases unless there’s a fifty per cent chance of success. And the faulty first breath test opens up the gates for the hip-flask defence.’

‘Can we back up a minute?’ Tony butted in. ‘What’s the fruit of the poisoned tree? And what’s this hip-flask defence?’

Carol waved a hand at Brandon to indicate he had the floor. ‘Fruit of the poisoned tree is an American legal principle that mostly applies to searches. If the search isn’t legal, nothing you get from it can be produced as evidence. And anything that stems from it, you have to be able to prove you came at it from a different route. What Carol’s saying is that even if the first breath test wasn’t accurate, she thinks the subsequent one at the police station will stand.’

‘And won’t it?’

Carol shook her head. ‘The hip-flask defence is where I say, “Oh, your worship, I was so shocked and stunned at the breath test that I had to take a swig from the hip flask in my handbag while I was in the back of the police car on the way to the station. And that’s why the second test was over the limit.”’

‘Do people actually get away with that?’

Brandon nodded. ‘There’s precedent. So the CPS can legitimately say the wheels could come off these cases very expensively so let’s not bother. And if anybody asks, we can provide that as a legitimate excuse.’

Tony held his breath for what felt like an impossible length of time before Carol spoke. ‘So what’s the big deal to make all this worth fixing?’

‘You come back into harness.’

‘I won’t work for James Blake again.’ It was obviously a red line, not a bargaining chip.

Brandon smiled, his mouth a wry curve. ‘You won’t have to. This is something quite different.’

Before he could say more, she cut across him. ‘The last time you dragged me back into the ranks, it didn’t go well. I lost one officer and came close to losing another.’

Brandon sighed. ‘Nobody’s more aware of that than I am. But between the two of you, you’ve saved a lot of lives too. And that’s why you’re held in such high regard. Why you’re the one and only person in the frame for this job. What I’m offering you is the chance to run a free-standing Major Incident Team. You’d hand-pick your officers. You’d be on standby to pick up murders, serious sexual assaults and the like over six distinct forces here in the North.’ He leaned down and picked up a computer bag. From it he drew a file. He flicked it open and spread a map out on the table. It showed the force areas of Bradfield Metropolitan Police and five others across the North of England, from East Yorkshire to Cumbria. ‘The Home Office has chosen these forces as a test-bed for this because they already share scenes of crime teams and forensic services. You’d be in charge of high-level investigations with a core team who would call on local CID and uniform for back room support.’

‘The grunt work,’ Carol said. ‘That’d make a team like this popular with the locals.’

Brandon shrugged. ‘Something you’ve never had to finesse before.’ The sarcasm was only thinly veiled.

Carol finally cracked a smile. ‘How to keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. My motto.’

‘Where’s the catch?’ Tony said.

‘I don’t think there is one,’ Brandon said. ‘We get a first-class detective back doing what she does best, we have the chance to try out a new style of policing, and Carol avoids her life crashing and burning. Do you think there’s a downside in there, Tony?’

‘Where would we be based?’ Carol asked.

Brandon laughed. ‘My God, Carol, you haven’t lost your knack. Straight to the only unattractive part of the whole equation. You’ll be working out of an office in Bradfield. That’s not negotiable. It’s logistically the best choice and they have space. However, you won’t be at force HQ.’

‘Where will we be?’

‘Skenfrith Street. The third floor’s been empty ever since they took the station out of mothballs. It’s all cabled up and ready to roll, but it’s never been used.’ Brandon’s smile was encouraging.

‘Skenfrith Street,’ Carol said flatly. ‘Home of DCI Alex Fielding, who hates me even more than Blake. Fabulous. The last time I was in Skenfrith Street –’ she gestured with her thumb at Tony – ‘he was under arrest for murder. She’s going to love having us under the same roof, reminding us of her finest hour.’

Startled, Tony yelped, ‘Us?’

‘Well, duh.’ Carol rolled her eyes. ‘I wouldn’t even consider this if I wasn’t allowed a proper team.’

Brandon gave a satisfied nod. ‘I take it that’s a yes, then?’

‘I’d like some time to think about it.’

Brandon shook his head. ‘That’s not going to be possible. The court is gearing up downstairs. If we’re going to get you off the hook, it has to be now.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Tony said. ‘If you’ve got enough weight behind you to make a drink-driving charge go up in smoke, you’ve got more than enough juice to get the CPS to ask for an adjournment. Long enough to give Carol a chance to consider this properly.’

‘As I said earlier, there are three other people who are also being let off the hook to make Carol’s case dismissal look kosher. So it’s all got to happen this morning. There’s no leeway.’ Brandon’s voice was steely, his face implacable. It was a stern reminder to them both that, behind his geniality, Brandon was capable of unyielding obduracy. They’d seen it employed on their behalf in the past; it was uncomfortable to be on the receiving end now.

Carol knew when she was beaten. ‘One more question,’ she said, defeat conceded. ‘And it might be the deal-breaker. Obviously there’s a chain of command. Who am I answerable to?’

‘The Home Office in the final analysis. For now, while we’re putting the pieces together and seeing how things pan out in practice, I have oversight on their behalf. The chief constables of the various forces will have to come through me.’

This time, everyone smiled. The relief was palpable. Carol took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. ‘Given the alternative… when do I start?’

He stood up and extended a hand across the table. ‘Tomorrow morning suit you?’

Carol accepted the handshake. ‘What time?’

‘I’ll see you there at nine,’ Brandon said. ‘Don’t let me down, Carol. There’s a lot riding on this.’

A flush coloured her cheeks. ‘I’m done with letting people down, John.’ She tipped her head to Tony. ‘He’s always on about redemption and rehabilitation. I’ll try and prove both of you right.’

23

A
fter Kate Rawlins, he’d felt an odd mixture of triumph and jitteriness. He hugged his knowledge to himself, pleased he’d taken the first step on this evangelical undertaking. But when he closed his eyes at night, anxiety kicked in. He’d exercised power over life and death. His had been the last face Kate Rawlins had seen. And yet, a current of apprehension ran through him like the tremor you got in your arms from using a hammer drill. Would he, could he get away with it? But as the days had passed and it became clear that everybody was convinced she’d killed herself, he began to relax.

What helped to soothe him was the preparation for the next one. He’d shortlisted another three women and started watching each of them whenever he could. This time, Sylvia Plath would be his template. He knew from the start it would be a challenge. Plath had gassed herself, but that was back before the days of natural gas. Then, stoves and household fires were fuelled by poisonous coal gas. People put their heads in the oven and turned on the gas and they died. Painlessly, by all accounts. But it was the gas that killed them.

That wasn’t going to work so well for him. But he’d been thinking about this for a long time and after testing out a raft of different ideas and rejecting them, he finally had a plan. Daisy Morton had a public profile. And so he’d pretended to be a journalist from a women’s magazine. ‘At home with Daisy Morton’ was the pitch. Appealing to their vanity always worked.

And then it had been laughably easy. He’d turned up at the agreed time, and of course she’d offered tea. He’d slipped the GHB into her tea. While he waited for it to take effect, he’d had to listen to the rubbish she spouted. If he’d had any doubts about what he was doing, that would have crushed them. Once she’d started slurring her stupid words, he’d given her a couple of valium to make sure she stayed calm and controllable; if they did a post-mortem toxicology screen and it showed up, they’d assume she’d taken it to calm herself down and make sure she went through with her plan.

Once the drugs kicked in, it was easy. Plastic bag over the head, gas from the hob via a piece of vacuum cleaner hose, and patience. She’d barely twitched as the gas filled her lungs, displacing the air and slowly suffocating her. He’d watched the plastic membrane move in and out with her breathing until it finally stopped. There was a thrill in knowing, as with Kate, that he could stop it any time he wanted. It was almost sexual. But he was stronger than that. He had a goal and he wasn’t going to be deflected by pity or shame.

He checked her pulse, then checked it again a few minutes later. When he was satisfied she was really gone, he removed the bag and the hose and turned on all the burners on the hob. He fetched towels from the bathroom, wet them and stuffed them along the bottom of the back door. He put more behind the kitchen door as he closed it on the way out. They wouldn’t stop the gas escaping but if there was the sort of explosion he was hoping for, the remnants of them would be in the right area. And if there was no detonation, the assumption would be that they’d been pushed back when the kitchen door was opened.

He found Daisy’s mobile in the pocket of her jeans and rigged it up to the old-fashioned answering machine he’d brought with him, setting them both down close to the stove.

His last act before he left the house was to pull the pages loose from the Sylvia Plath book and leave them in the hallway. He was no expert, but he thought an explosion would blow them out into the garden. Some of them would survive.

Then he settled in for the long wait. If things went according to the routine he’d observed four times now, nobody would return to the house before four in the afternoon. By then the house would be filled with gas. When her kids came home, as soon as they approached the front door, he would call Daisy’s mobile phone. That in turn would set off the answering machine, creating a sustained electrical arc that would be enough to ignite the room full of gas.

That day, waiting had been almost unbearable. He could have left it at Daisy lying with her head in the oven but he wanted something more spectacular, something that couldn’t be ignored. These deaths needed to make a mark. They needed to make women sit up and take notice.

To understand that being like Daisy and Kate wasn’t going to end well.

24

W
orking in Carol Jordan’s MIT had placed Paula firmly at the leading edge of modern policing. But when it came to teasing information out of other cops, she was perfectly capable of stepping back in time. And so she had arranged to meet Detective Sergeant Franny Riley in a gloomy pub a couple of streets away from Bradfield Police’s Northern Division HQ. The pub consisted of a series of small rooms furnished with dark wooden tables and heavy chairs. Although it had been years since smoking had been banned in pubs, Paula could have sworn the penetrating stink of stale smoke hung in the air. It wasn’t coming from her either – it had been six weeks since she’d replaced her heavy-duty habit with an e-cigarette, much to Elinor’s relief and delight.