The Truth-Teller's Lie (32 page)

29

4/9/06

FOR THE FIRST time in his police career, Simon was pleased to see Proust. He was the one who’d called the inspector, told him to come in. Nearly begged him. Anything was better than being alone with his thoughts. There’s something wrong with my life if,
in extremis,
I turn to the Snowman, Simon thought. But who else was there? With Charlie gone, he could think of no one whose company would make him feel better. Ringing his folks was out of the question. The minute they got a whiff of any sort of problem, their voices filled with shrill alarm, and Simon had to put his own worries to one side in order to comfort them.

He still thought of Charlie as gone, even though Sellers had phoned to update him. He knew where she was, that Gibbs was with her, that she was safe. He also knew she’d been to bed with Graham Angilley. A serial rapist. Without knowing what he was, who he was. The idea made Simon panic. How could Charlie ever be the same after an experience like that? What ought he to say next time he saw her?

Assuming he ever saw her again. She’d run off without a word to him. Even now, knowing he knew where she was, she hadn’t called him. Her phone was in her bag, which Naomi Jenkins had taken, but she could have used Gibbs’.

She’s spoken to Sellers and Gibbs. It’s only you she doesn’t want to speak to.

Well, why the fuck should she? What use had Simon ever been to Charlie? A few months ago she’d drawn his attention to a song that was playing on his car radio, when they’d been driving to a meeting at Silsford nick. Simon still remembered the lyrics; they were about one person giving another nothing but pain. Charlie had said, ‘I didn’t know you were a Kaiser Chiefs fan. Or are you playing this song for some other reason?’ She’d looked scornful at first, then disappointed when Simon told her it was the radio, not a CD. He hadn’t chosen the song, didn’t even know it.

Proust’s arrival stopped him from thinking about which song he’d choose now. The inspector was pink-eyed and unshaven. ‘It’s two in the morning, Waterhouse,’ he said. ‘You interrupted a dream. Now I’ll never know how it ends.’

‘A good one or a bad one?’ Simon was playing for time. Delay the bollocking for as long as possible.

‘I don’t know. Lizzie and I had just bought a new house and moved into it. It was much bigger than our present one. We arrived tired, and went straight to sleep. I got no further, thanks to you.’

‘A bad dream,’ said Simon. ‘I know how it ends. You realise you’ve made a terrible mistake buying the new house. But the old one’s already sold, to people who love it and are determined to stay. There’s no way of getting it back. A nightmare of eternal regret.’

‘Charming.’ Proust looked cross. ‘Thank you so much for that. Since you’re feeling chatty, perhaps you could explain why you’ve woken me up to give me information you could just as easily have given me this afternoon.’

‘I didn’t know then that Charlie had taken Naomi Jenkins to Scotland with her.’

Proust frowned. ‘Why not?’

‘I . . . I mustn’t have been listening when she told me.’

‘Hmm. Hear that, Waterhouse? The sound of thinly veiled scepticism? You and Sergeant Zailer are like Siamese twins. You always know where she is, who she’s with, what she had for breakfast. Why not this time?’

Simon said nothing. Oddly, he felt better now that the Snowman was berating him; he felt as if he’d handed something over, something he was glad to be shot of.

‘So, let’s get this right: the first you knew about Sergeant Zailer taking Jenkins to Scotland with her was Sellers’ phone call, is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And when did you receive this call?’

‘Mid-evening.’

‘Why not tell me then? You could have saved me the trouble of getting into my pyjamas.’

Simon examined his shoes. At that stage, he’d thought he could ride it out. He’d grown more edgy as the night went on, when Charlie failed to contact him. He’d been expecting her to ring ever since Sellers had, to tell Simon what she wanted him to do. She hadn’t, though, and it had suddenly struck him as entirely possible that she never would. In which case, Simon needed to tell Proust enough of the truth to cover himself.

The inspector’s eyes narrowed, ready to scrutinise each new lie as it emerged. ‘If the sergeant went to this chalet place to arrest the owner and his wife, why didn’t she take you with her, and some uniforms? Why take Naomi Jenkins, who is at best a witness and at worst a suspect?’

‘Maybe she wanted Jenkins to identify Angilley as the man who assaulted her.’

‘Well, that’s not the way to do it!’ said Proust angrily. ‘That’s the way to get your car stolen, and your bag. As has become apparent. Why would Sergeant Zailer be so stupid? She put herself and Jenkins at risk, all our hard work—’

‘I’ve just had a call from the police in Scotland,’ Simon interrupted him.

‘I find that harder to believe than anything I’ve heard so far. That lot are useless.’

‘They’ve found Charlie’s car.’

‘Where?’

‘Not far from Silver Brae Chalets. About four miles down the road. The handbag was gone, though.’

Proust sighed heavily, rubbing his chin. ‘There are so many dubious aspects to this, I hardly know where to begin, Watérhouse. Why would Naomi Jenkins, having gone to Scotland to identify her rapist, suddenly take it into her head to steal a car and run away—start behaving like a criminal, effectively?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Simon lied. He couldn’t tell the inspector what Sellers had told him: that Naomi didn’t trust Charlie anymore, that she knew about Charlie’s involvement with Graham Angilley because of something Steph had said.

‘Speak to Sergeant Zailer,’ said Proust impatiently. ‘Something must have happened, mustn’t it? At the chalets. Sergeant Zailer must know what it is, and so should you, by now. When did you last speak to her?’

‘Not since before she left,’ Simon admitted.

‘What aren’t you telling me, Waterhouse?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘If Sergeant Zailer went to Silver Brae Chalets to arrest the Angilleys, why did Sellers and Gibbs also go there, separately? Does it take three of them? One detective with uniform back-up would have been adequate.’

‘I’m not sure, sir.’

Proust walked a small circle round Simon. ‘Waterhouse, you know me pretty well by now. Wouldn’t you say? You must know that if there’s one thing I hate more than being lied to, it’s being lied to in the middle of the night.’

Silence was the best Simon could do. He wondered if, on one level, he wanted Proust to break him down, force the full story out of him. Charlie and Graham Angilley. Could the Snowman say anything that would make him feel better about that?

‘Maybe I ought to ask Naomi Jenkins. She’s unlikely to be less helpful than you. What’s being done about finding her?’

At last, a question Simon could answer truthfully. ‘Some uniforms are at the hospital. Sellers said Charlie’s certain that’s where Jenkins’ll go, to see Robert Haworth.’

‘So you and the sergeant are communicating via Sellers. Interesting. ’ The inspector walked another slow circle round Simon. ‘Why does Jenkins want to see Robert Haworth? She knows he raped Prudence Kelvey, doesn’t she? Sergeant Zailer told her?’

‘Yes. I don’t know why she wants to see him, but apparently she does. A lot.’

‘Waterhouse, it’s two in the perishing morning!’ Proust tapped his watch. ‘She’d be there by now, if that was where she was going. Sergeant Zailer must be wrong. Have we got anyone outside Jenkins’ house?’

Shit.
‘No, sir.’

‘Of course we haven’t. Silly of me.’ The voice had thinned; the words were projected at Simon like lead pellets. ‘Get someone there as soon as possible. If she’s not there, try Yvon Cotchin’s ex-husband’s house. Then Jenkins’ parents’. I’m astonished to hear myself saying all this, Waterhouse.’ As if afraid he’d been too subtle in his disapproval, Proust yelled, ‘What’s the matter with you? You shouldn’t need a sleep-befuddled old man like me to tell you the basics!’

‘I’ve been busy, sir.’ Everyone else is in fucking Scotland.
Sir.
‘Charlie said Jenkins’d go straight to the hospital. Since she was the last of us to speak to her, I assumed she knew what she was talking about.’

‘Find Jenkins and find her quickly! I want to know why she absconded. I was never happy with her alibi for the period during which Robert Haworth must have been attacked. Her best friend’s word is all we’ve got, and that same friend designed Graham Angilley’s website!’

‘You never said you had a problem with the alibi, sir,’ Simon muttered.

‘I’m saying so now, aren’t I? I’ve got a problem with this whole confounded mess, Waterhouse! Circles within circles, that’s what it is. We’re chasing our tails! Look at that big, black blob.’ He pointed at the whiteboard on the wall of the CID room, on which Charlie had written, in black marker pen, the names of everybody involved in the case, with arrows between them wherever there was a connection. Proust was right; there were more connections than one might expect. Charlie’s diagram now resembled a morbidly obese spider—a huge black mass of lines, arrows, circles, loops. The shape of chaos. ‘Have you ever
seen
anything so unsatisfactory?’ Proust demanded. ‘Because I haven’t!’

Speaking of unsatisfactory, thought Simon. ‘Juliet Haworth’s stopped talking, sir.’

‘Did she ever start?’

‘No, I mean stopped altogether. I’ve tried twice, and both times she was completely silent. I knew it’d happen. The closer she thinks we are to the truth, the less she’s going to say. There’s enough evidence to convict her, but . . .’

‘But it’s not good enough,’ Proust finished Simon’s sentence. ‘Much as I’d like a conviction here to satisfy the higher-ups, I want to know what went on. I want to see a clear picture, Waterhouse.’

‘Me too, sir. It’s getting clearer. We know Angilley selected his victims from websites, at least two from sites designed by Yvon Cotchin.’

‘What about Tanya, the waitress from Cardiff who killed herself, the one who couldn’t spell? Did she have a website?’

‘She’s the exception,’ Simon conceded. ‘We can explain the audiences at the rapes—Angilley was selling hard-core stag nights. I’ve found references to his operation in Internet chatrooms already. That’s what I’ve been doing . . .’

‘Instead of talking to your sergeant, or trying to find Naomi Jenkins,’ Proust said pointedly. ‘Or telling me the truth about what’s really going on in your peculiar mind and your even more peculiar life, Waterhouse. If you’ll pardon my bluntness.’

Simon froze. This was among the more hurtful things he’d had said to him over the years. Charlie would have said, ‘Peculiar, as far as the Snowman’s concerned, is any man who doesn’t have a bread-baking, sock-darning wifie at home.’ Simon could hear her voice clearly in his mind, but it wasn’t the same as having her with him.

His life
was
peculiar. He didn’t have a girlfriend, had no real friends apart from Charlie.

‘Sellers has picked up a stack of evidence from Silver Brae Chalets,’ he went on. ‘Angilley had it all neatly filed, as if it were completely legitimate: contact numbers for dozens of men, and a list of twenty-three women’s names—past victims and future ones, by the look of it. Some names with dates and ticks beside them, some without. Sellers has Googled all the women—they’ve all either got their own websites or a page on a company one. They’re all professional—’

The telephone in front of Simon began to ring. He picked it up. ‘DC Waterhouse, CID,’ he said automatically. It wasn’t going to be Charlie: she’d have rung his mobile.

‘Simon? Thank fucking God!’

His heart soared. It wasn’t Charlie. But it sounded a bit like her. ‘Olivia?’

‘I lost your mobile number and I’ve spent the past hour being pissed around, first by an electronic imbecile and then by a human one. Never mind. Look, I’m worried about Charlie. Can you send a police car round to her house?’

Simon’s nerves buzzed as he said to Proust, ‘Get some uniforms to blue-light it round to Charlie’s place.’ He’d never given the Snowman an order before.

Proust picked up a phone on the adjacent desk.

‘What’s happened?’ Simon asked Olivia.

‘Charlie left a message for me today—well, yesterday, I suppose, except I haven’t been to sleep yet. She told me to go round to her house. She said the key’d be in its usual place, and to let myself in if she wasn’t back yet.’

‘And?’ Simon knew about the key Charlie left underneath her wheelie-bin. She’d left it there for him on the odd occasion. He’d remonstrated with her; what was the point of being a detective if you left your key in the first place any burglar would look? ‘I haven’t got the mental energy to think of a better hiding place,’ she’d said wearily.

‘I got there at about eight,’ said Olivia. ‘Charlie wasn’t there, and neither was the key. I stuck a note through the letter box, telling her to ring me. I went to the pub, had something to eat and a couple of drinks, read my book, didn’t hear anything. Eventually I got really worried and went back to the house. She still wasn’t back. I sat in my car and waited for her, basically. Normally I’d have sacked it and gone home, but the message she’d left me . . . she sounded really upset. She as good as told me something bad had happened.’

‘And?’ Simon tried hard to keep his voice steady.
Get to the fucking point.

‘I fell asleep in my car. When I woke up, a light was on in Charlie’s lounge and the curtains were closed. Before, they’d been open. I assumed she was back, so I went and rang the bell, ready to have a go at her for not phoning me as soon as she got in and saw my note. But no one answered the door. I know someone was in there, I saw movements in the hall. In fact, I’m sure it was two people. One of them must have been Charlie, but then why didn’t she let me in? You’ll probably think I’m being neurotic, but I know something’s not right.’

‘Charlie’s in Scotland,’ Simon told her.
And Graham Angilley isn’t.
‘She can’t be in her house.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. It was a last-minute thing.’