The Burning (37 page)

It took days to get through all of it, scribbling notes as I went, fuelled by endless cups of tea and diverted by occasional spats with my mother, purely from habit. Dad took refuge in the front room where there was a vast TV and Sky Sports, and for a little while, it was just like being a teenager again. The effect was heightened when Mum enlisted my brother Dec to help her retrieve my belongings from Ian’s flat. My life amounted to pathetically little when it was in bags and boxes. Dec carried the lot up to my old bedroom where it sat in a heap, because I refused to unpack.

Dec being Dec, of course, he attempted to persuade me to stay. ‘Mum and Dad would love you to be around more. They don’t see enough of you.’

He was four years older than me but seemed middle-aged already. He had got married when he was twenty-five and already had two kids, girls. He lived in Croydon, not far from Mum and Dad, but I knew – because he had told me – that he thought I should pull my weight more where they were concerned. He had responsibilities, after all. I, it seemed, did not.

You would have thought that the grandchildren would have been distraction enough for my mother, but she managed not to lose her sense of grievance if I didn’t call her often enough. I had a feeling that Dec was hurt that his devotion wasn’t recognised as it should have been. But then, he’d never really learned the lesson that life wasn’t fair. I ignored Dec’s comments. Being at home was temporary, I promised myself. I would be off on my own again soon, even if I didn’t know where I was going to go.

This wasn’t the only thing on my mind, of course. Generally, the things I didn’t know vastly outnumbered the things I did, both personally and professionally, but the difference was that police mysteries didn’t make my head hurt. But all the time, my mind was working away on what I had read, what I had seen, what I had heard. And when I pushed the last pile of paper away from me on the third day of reading, I had a sheet of paper in front of me that was dense with notes and scribbled questions, and a growing conviction that I was tantalisingly close to a definite answer. I had a list of suspects who had clear motives to kill Rebecca Haworth: she had many more enemies than the average twenty-eight-year-old. I knew that some of them had lied, and lied again – I could prove it. But I couldn’t yet prove which one of them had murdered her.

I dug through the boxes I hadn’t yet unpacked until I unearthed DCI Garland’s fat dog-eared folder of notes on Adam Rowley. I sorted through it until I found the inspector’s account of Adam Rowley’s life up to its early termination, specifically his family background, and read it with renewed interest before picking up my phone. Belcott answered on the second ring.

‘Belcott.’

‘Peter, it’s Maeve Kerrigan. I understand you’re working on the Haworth murder. I’ve got something I’d like you to follow up.’ I was at my silkiest, knowing that it would irritate him almost beyond endurance to be working for me.

‘Of course,’ he said stiffly. ‘What do you need?’

‘A twenty-year-old man named Adam Rowley’ – I spelled it – ‘drowned in Oxford in 2002. I want to trace his older brother. I don’t have a first name or any other details but he would have lived in Nottingham and his parents’ names were Tristan and Helen Rowley. Tristan Rowley was a doctor, if that helps.’

‘Not a lot, as it happens. Any idea if the parents still live in Nottingham?’

‘Nope,’ I said cheerfully. ‘And call me back when you find out about him. If you get hold of him, I’d like to talk to him.’ I wanted to find out who else might have mourned for Adam, apart from Rebecca. I wanted to know who might have wanted revenge.

He hung up without saying goodbye, which I didn’t mind. I was occupied with searching through my notebook for what I’d taken down during my interview with Caspian Faraday when he rang back, surprisingly quickly.

‘Adam Rowley’s brother Sebastian is thirty-one, married, and lives in Edinburgh. I’ve just spoken to his wife. Seb is in surgery, apparently, but he will call you when he’s free, she said. He’s a vet. Small-animals practice.’

‘You found out a lot.’ I was actually impressed.

‘Mrs Rowley junior likes to talk. Was there anything else?’

‘Yes. I want you to find out everything you can about Delia Faraday, Caspian Faraday’s wife. Specifically, where she was on the twenty-sixth of November and in the days leading up to it, and what kind of car she drives. And anything else I might be interested in.’

‘Right.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you really think she was involved?’

‘I want to rule a few things out.’ I was deliberately vague; I wasn’t ready yet to tell anyone what I was thinking, let alone Belcott, who would hijack my ideas in a heartbeat.

‘I live to serve,’ he said, and hung up.

A pleasant-sounding Seb Rowley called me a couple of hours later, cheerful, intrigued and not a little surprised about being contacted by the Metropolitan Police. I asked him a few questions about his brother’s death and got no new information from him, except that Adam had been a difficult child, inclined to sulk, and that he and his brother had never got on.

‘Three years is a big gap at that age. Maybe if he’d lived longer we’d have got to know one another a bit better as adults.’ The shrug travelled down the phone line. ‘Never happened.’

I persevered. ‘Was Adam particularly close to anyone in the family? A cousin, someone like that?’

‘No. We don’t have a big extended family. My parents were both only children, so no cousins.’ He sounded puzzled but unguarded and I had to believe he was telling the truth. He didn’t know anyone named Gil Maddick. Dead end.

Belcott had left me a voicemail, I discovered on winding up my conversation with Seb Rowley. Delia Faraday didn’t have a UK driver’s licence, but there was a black Range Rover Vogue registered to the Highgate address in addition to the Aston Martin.

I headed back to the table, to the CCTV logs. We had searched far and wide for clues and there was a lot of CCTV, pulled in from the surrounding streets. Colin Vale, a tall, cadaverous detective who looked as if he hadn’t seen daylight in years, had spent weeks running the plates from all of the Operation Mandrake CCTV through the PNC and DVLA databases and then following up, tracing drivers, ruling them out because they had alibis for Burning Man murders. Then he had to do it all for Rebecca’s murder in the light of Godley’s decision to run the enquiry alongside the main investigation. If there was one thing DC Vale was good at, though, it was organising information. The spreadsheets he’d produced were things of beauty. I had looked through them already in my trawl through the file, but now I looked again, and this time I concentrated on the cars that had been tagged as ‘not of interest/untraced’, looking for the Range Rover. About halfway down the fourth page, I saw something completely unexpected, something that made my heart jump with shock. A make and model that I recognised. One occupant.

Godley, or whoever had assembled the file on his behalf, had been thorough enough to include three disks of CCTV, and Vale had lovingly cross-referenced each entry in his log with a timestamp and location. It was simple to find the right disk, slightly harder to persuade Dad to part with the remote control for five minutes – ‘Why? What is it? Is it a film? I’ll put it on for you’ – and the work of seconds to select the right part of the recording. It was a tape from a petrol station near the New Covent Garden market, the angle acute enough to show the traffic passing for a second or two. I held my breath as the car I wanted to see crossed the bottom of the picture, one occupant visible in no great detail, but clearly enough, especially on Dad’s giant TV, that I could guess at the features and know who I was looking at. It might not have been enough to convince a jury, but it had convinced me.

And it changed everything.

Chapter Thirteen

M
AEVE

Godley had told me to give him a call if I had anything to discuss, but I hadn’t expected him to come to see me that day. It was flattering and nerve-racking in equal measure. He stood in the dining-room doorway, looking too tall in the context of my parents’ house, and surveyed the scene in front of him.

‘Plenty to look at. I wondered how long it would take.’

‘I’m not saying I’ve worked everything out,’ I warned him. ‘But I’m pretty sure we have enough to warrant an arrest, if not to get a conviction. It’s circumstantial, mainly, but I just don’t think there’s any other way of explaining what I’ve found out.’

He took off his coat and jacket and threw them over the back of a chair, then sat down opposite me, rolling up his shirtsleeves and drawing a blank piece of paper towards himself so he could take notes. ‘Start at the beginning, then, Maeve. And don’t leave anything out.’

‘OK. Well, as you know, when we looked at the crime scene we weren’t sure if Rebecca had been a victim of the Burning Man or not, because of the way her body was left. It was a by-the-numbers imitation of his manner of killing and disposal of the body, but it didn’t ring true. There was something tentative about it. It wasn’t him, but it was someone trying to be like him. And that person is Louise North.’

Godley didn’t so much as twitch a muscle, but I could sense doubt emanating from him and I went on quickly to explain what I had found out.

‘I couldn’t find any trace of Rebecca Haworth in the twenty-four hours before she died. No one saw her or spoke to her – not her neighbours, not her friends, not her family. She didn’t show up on any of the CCTV we checked. She didn’t use her oyster card on public transport. We got in touch with taxi firms all over the capital and no one recalled giving her a lift. In fact, the last trace of her that I could find was her mobile phone signal. It went off the air on the Thursday night by London Bridge, in the vicinity of her flat – so the phone was switched off or was destroyed then. But before that, it was in Fulham – within a hundred yards, give or take a few, of the mobile phone mast nearest Louise’s house.’

‘She could have been visiting her friend.’

I shook my head. ‘Louise said she hadn’t seen her for months.’

‘OK, she could have been visiting someone else.’

‘Who? She didn’t have any other friends in the local area, as far as I can tell. We can go door-to-door and see if anyone remembers seeing her in the neighbourhood on the Wednesday evening or the Thursday. But I think Louise lured her to her house on Wednesday night, with the intention of keeping her there until Thursday. I saw the lab reports; the body fluids that Dr Hanshaw sent for toxicology came back positive for sedatives. What if Louise kept her there, knowing that she probably wouldn’t be missed since she didn’t have a job or a flatmate or a boyfriend? What if she drugged her? And what if she killed her?’

‘Evidence, Maeve. Cell-site analysis isn’t going to be good enough in a built-up area. The signal bounces around from mast to mast; you can only narrow it down to a quarter-mile radius at best.’

‘Take it as an indication of where we should be looking, then. That’s not all.’ I quickly outlined how I’d found Louise’s car in the CCTV logs, and checked to see that she was driving it. ‘She had no reason to be there at that time of the morning. She didn’t mention being there to me, even when she heard where Rebecca’s body was found. I can’t believe that she wouldn’t have made some comment about the coincidence if it had been innocent. And since then, she’s got rid of her car and bought a new one. A present to herself, I believe. Maybe a reward for a job well done.’

‘OK. That’s better. I like that we can put her in the relevant location at the correct time. But if she’s got rid of the car, we’re not going to have any forensics.’

‘I imagine that was the idea. She left a few false trails for us here and there – she’d thought of leaving voicemail messages on Rebecca’s phone to make it look as if she was trying to get in touch with her after she was already dead. She even left one on Rebecca’s old work number. But Louise knew that Rebecca had left her job. She’d helped her to tidy out her desk. Rebecca’s assistant remembered the name when I rang her today and prompted her. Why would she call a number she knew wasn’t going to be answered unless she wanted to make us think she was out of touch with Rebecca? And don’t forget that she turned up in Rebecca’s flat when we went to check it out. She was tidying the place to make sure there were no tell-tale clues that she’d invited her to dinner the day before she died – no notes Rebecca had left that might give us a clue to her motive. She said that Rebecca was untidy in her personal habits. Everyone else I’ve spoken to has said how meticulous she was, how organised. I thought it was a sign of the strain Rebecca had been under, but if you turn it around and look at it the other way, Louise lied to us.’

‘You mentioned motive – what could hers be?’

‘I’m not sure. But maybe it’s as simple as finally getting fed up always being in Rebecca’s shadow. Though Louise was also there in Oxford when Adam Rowley died, and she didn’t like me asking about it. She got really uptight. I thought she was scared of Gil Maddick overhearing us, but now I think that perhaps she was worried for herself because I was getting too close for comfort.’

‘Maddick.’ Godley pulled a face. ‘That’s part of the problem for me. I don’t see how you’ve gone from thinking she’s a potential victim to being sure she’s the killer.’

‘I was supposed to see her as a victim. And I was so busy thinking of her in that light, I forgot to consider her as a suspect. That was the plan. She’s been pushing me towards Gil Maddick all along – he’s the ex-boyfriend, he has a history of violence towards his girlfriends and his break-up with Rebecca seemed to act as the starting gun for her decline into catastrophic personal circumstances, including the loss of her job and the intensification of her drug use and eating disorder. Louise wasn’t the only one of Rebecca’s friends to tell me that Maddick was possessive. It seems as if he tried to keep her away from them – that’s classic controlling behaviour. But it’s not proof that he wanted her dead. I can’t find any evidence of them being in touch before she died – no emails, no phone calls, no texts. I honestly think he’d moved on.’

‘But you were absolutely sure he was guilty, Maeve.’ Godley’s voice was gentle. ‘That’s hard to explain away now that you’re equally sure about Louise.’

‘I thought he was an abuser who resented his ex starting a new life, but that just didn’t fit in with the facts. He’s in line to get her life insurance money, but he’s wealthy anyway, and I don’t think he had the least idea he was the named beneficiary. Then I thought he might have been looking to get revenge on Rebecca – he does bear a startling resemblance to the boy who died in Oxford, the one Rebecca felt so guilty about. But I think that’s truly a coincidence. It’s not really a surprise that she’d find the same things attractive in another man; she was obsessed with Adam Rowley.’

‘How does Rowley’s death fit in?’

‘I’m not sure about that either,’ I confessed. I had called DCI Garland before Godley arrived. He had been in a pub but if he’d been drinking, it hadn’t dulled his edge in the slightest.

‘I was wondering if I’d ever hear from you again. What did you make of it? Get any closer to working out who did it?’

‘I don’t think you’d ever be able to get enough evidence for a charge – not at this stage, anyway – but I do have some idea as to what happened to Adam Rowley, yes.’

‘Go on, my love. I’m listening.’

I had told him my suspicions: that Rebecca and Louise had known more than they’d let on about Rowley’s death. Either Rebecca had killed him herself and Louise had helped her to cover it up, or Louise had played some part in his death with Rebecca’s support and connivance. Louise had been able to cope with the pressure of the subsequent investigation but Rebecca had cracked. That was why they had fallen out.

‘Louise was in a good position to know that Adam was very drunk and vulnerable because she had been serving him all night in the bar. Either of them could have given him a nudge and sent him into the river.’

From the other end of the line, there came a long, low chuckle.

‘Well done, girly. That was where I ended up too, a long time ago, but I didn’t have a hope of getting the CPS to take it any further. I was always wary of Louise North. Cold, she was. I couldn’t fluster her, and believe me, I tried.’

‘Interesting that DCI Garland didn’t like her,’ Godley commented when I recounted our conversation. ‘But he didn’t find any evidence to link her with the boy’s death, did he?’

‘No, but he didn’t get a chance to treat it as a murder enquiry once the coroner had ruled the death accidental. There was a possibility Adam had been drugged without his knowledge so that he was somewhat incapacitated. But he could have taken the pills voluntarily. There was an abrasion on the back of his head that might have been caused by a blow, but it was also consistent with drowning. He didn’t seem to struggle when he fell into the water – he was a young, fit, healthy man and he made no attempt to climb back out onto the bank. He was drunk at the time, but I still think it’s strange he didn’t try to save himself. I think whatever happened that night it gives Louise a major motive to want Rebecca dead, though.’

‘Go on.’

‘Rebecca’s life was teetering on the edge of disaster at the time she died – she had lost a job that she was desperate to keep, so desperate that she offered to sleep with her boss to convince him to change his mind, and if you’d seen him, you’d know that was not the easy way out. She was trying to hide the fact that she was unemployed from her family and friends, so kept on her very expensive flat and tried to maintain her lifestyle. She had a ruinously expensive drug addiction to manage and her romantic relationships were complicated to say the least. We know that she blackmailed one lover, getting ten grand for promising not to tell his wife what he’d been up to. I can’t say he didn’t deserve it, and worse, but I wonder if Louise got a fright when she heard what Rebecca had done. She couldn’t take the risk that Rebecca would think of blackmailing her.’

‘There’s no evidence that she did, is there?’

‘No. If she did give her money, it was cash. And I seriously doubt she could afford to pay her off, unlike the other victim, because even though she’s well paid, she’s got a mortgage to pay on an expensive house. Besides, there’s the threat to her reputation to consider. Louise has worked very hard to get to where she is now. I don’t think she’d be too pleased about seeing it all disappear because her best friend is an unemployed cokehead.’

‘So you think they entered into a pact together to murder Adam Rowley, which we can’t prove. And we don’t know why. You think Louise was afraid of being blackmailed about it, which, again, we can’t prove. You think Louise drugged Rebecca, hid her away for twenty-four hours, murdered her and dumped her, on the strength of some CCTV and mobile phone cell-site analysis, and we might be able to prove some of it, but she’s had enough of a head start to get rid of most of the evidence.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

The superintendent sat for a long moment, his eyes hooded, and I began to wonder if I had fouled up spectacularly, if I had missed something obvious and embarrassed myself beyond redemption. I knew I had little evidence to prove my theory, and what there was was circumstantial. Just as the silence was becoming unbearable, he looked up, his eyes very blue, and smiled.

‘It’s patchy. But there’s something there. And I don’t want to see her get away with it if you’re right.’ He stood up and pulled on his jacket. ‘Are you fit to come with me? I want a council of war. We’ll see if we can’t find a way to out-think Ms North once and for all.’

I said yes, of course; even if I felt wobbly and exhausted, I wasn’t going to miss out. Godley drove back to the nick in what had to be record time, having phoned Judd and told him to round up a few of the key members of the team.

We were just coming into central London when my mobile phone rang. I looked at the screen and froze.

‘Boss, it’s Louise. Why would she be ringing my phone?’

Godley frowned. ‘Don’t answer it. If she leaves a message, we can all listen to it.’

It felt like hours until the ringing stopped. A few seconds later there was a beep: new voicemail message. I let out the breath I hadn’t realised I was holding and put the playback on speakerphone.

‘DC Kerrigan – Maeve? I just wanted to let you know that I’ve broken up with Gil. I saw on the news that you’d been injured … and I know you’ve been in hospital so I’m sure you don’t care too much, but I wanted to tell you.’ She sounded more hesitant than usual. ‘I wanted to say … I just thought you should know, when I tidied up Rebecca’s flat, I found a pen on the coffee table. It had Gil’s initials on it – GKM. It made me wonder if he’d been there, before she died. He said he hadn’t, but …’ There was a pause, and then a sigh. ‘I just don’t know what to think any more.’
Click
.

I looked at Godley, my eyebrows raised. ‘What do you think?’

He was concentrating on the road. ‘I think you’re an excellent police officer and your instincts are sound.’

‘You’re not convinced that we should go and arrest Gil Maddick?’

‘Are you?’

‘No.’ I was definite about it. ‘This just makes me more confident that she’s guilty.’

‘Then let’s work out how to catch her.’

Before we could do that, Godley had to convince a room full of highly sceptical policemen that we would be able to construct a legitimate case against Louise North. It was easier said than done. As the superintendent explained what we were doing there, I looked around the table, all too aware of the fact that I was in jeans and a jumper rather than my usual suit, and that my face was still bruised from my encounter with Selvaggi. DI Judd was sitting beside Godley and looked tired, but not hostile, which was more than could be said for Peter Belcott. Rob was there too, sitting down at the end of the table, with an encouraging expression on his face. After my first glance in his direction I didn’t dare look at him again in case I got distracted. Ben Dornton and Chris Pettifer were there because they were the team’s expert interviewers; Sam, Kev Cox and Colin Vale made up the remainder of the group. And none of them seemed completely convinced as Godley finished explaining what we knew, what we thought and what we needed to find out before handing over to me.