“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Lou, watching from the shadow of the ramp, put a hand up to her mouth.
Scarlett had moved so quickly, so unexpectedly, when she’d been still for so long. And Lou, and everyone else, had been thinking she was going to jump, or fall . . . and then she was this side of the wall and taking big strides toward Sam, falling into Sam’s arms.
Mick took a step back, just a step, ready to move again if Scarlett decided to rush for the edge and take Sam with her. But after a second he looked back toward the ramp and held up a hand, and Richard came out with a blanket that he’d managed to acquire from the ambulance that was waiting down in the bus station.
Scarlett hadn’t let go of Sam.
SAM
Tuesday 5 November 2013, 12:37
Without saying a word, Sam handed over Scarlett’s letters. They were sitting in the front of Lou’s car, still parked awkwardly inside the entrance to the car park in a hatched area clearly marked “NO PARKING—ACCESS REQUIRED.”
“What’s this?”
“Scarlett wrote them last night,” Sam said. “They both give me the impression she was planning to jump. She’s trying to suggest that the murders—or attempts—were planned between her and “a friend”—who we now think is Paul Stark—without Juliette’s knowledge. I’m not sure if that’s exactly how it was.”
“Let’s just be grateful she didn’t jump or fall,” Lou said. “We’ll take the rest of it one step at a time.” She pulled the first letter out of the envelope.
“I don’t doubt that she’s been through a lot. They both have.”
“It’s going to be difficult to prove,” Lou said.
“You’ve got the phone evidence. Juliette was phoning Scarlett’s mobile phone regularly; they’ve been meeting up.”
Lou looked up from the letter that was addressed to Sam. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Those poor girls.”
Scarlett’s Second Letter
Dear Sam,
Don’t try to find me, I need to do this now and I don’t want you to see.
You’ve been a good friend. I want to ask you to take care of Juliette, make sure she gets proper help and that she can have a good life. She deserves to be happy, she did nothing wrong and she is a good girl.
She had such a bad time with him, it was worse than I had because the people I was with were strangers. She had to do those things with her own father, the man who was supposed to love and care for her. She won’t tell you the details but it was bad. He waited till she was 16 to have sex with her because he thought that made it okay. He always talked about the “age of consent,” how you had to be 16 to have sex because at that age you gave your consent. He told Juliette that no man would ever want her, that she belonged to him and she had to have sex with him because that’s what girls were for. But before that he did other things to her and to me, before I was taken away. Sometimes he took pictures of us together that he said he was going to sell to other people. He said that meant nobody would ever want us, so we had to stay at home where he could look after us. The first time I remember this happening I was probably about five or six. When he started involving Juliette too she was probably about four. I remember feeling jealous because he had told me I was his special daughter, but then Juliette cried because she didn’t like it, and he hit her for crying, and after that I didn’t mind her being there because it meant I could look after her and stop him hitting her.
He never had sex with me but I think now he was waiting till I was 16. Juliette told me the first time he did it to her was at her birthday party. It was just the three of them, having a party. Our mother knew it was happening. Sometimes she was there.
I am crying now not because of what they did but because I thought I could make Juliette’s life better by getting her away from them. Juliette didn’t know any of it. I thought she would be happy with them gone. But she is so upset, she keeps crying and I think I’ve made everything worse. They were bad people but they were the only family she had after I was gone. And after what I’ve done I am a bad person too.
I told a friend what they were like. He wanted to help because he doesn’t like bullies or pedos. I think something like that happened to him when he was a little kid but he never told me what. He is a good bloke really, he wants to help people. He wanted to help us. I thought with our parents gone me and Juliette could have a fresh start. I never thought Juliette would find it so difficult.
Please Sam take care of my sister, she has a chance to be happy on her own. She might not tell you that any of this happened but it’s the truth. She would never say anything bad about them because she was always scared.
I’m not afraid of telling you because it’s the right thing to do.
Also I’m not afraid of dying, I think I died a long time ago.
I’m sorry if I got you into trouble, you were kind to me and I thought something might happen.
Love Scarlett x
LOU
Tuesday 5 November 2013, 15:25
Reggie Stark and his solicitor were sitting side by side in Briarstone police station’s Interview Room Three while Jane Phelps cautioned him and asked if he understood. Reggie looked tense, Lou thought, although it was hard to tell on a DVD from this lofty angle. The top of his head looked tense, anyway, and he was sitting bolt upright in the chair, his knee jiggling. Across the desk, Jane Phelps sat with her notes on her lap; next to her, Les Finnegan’s receding hair, his pate shiny in the lights.
She fast-forwarded.
“. . . I don’t think I can tell you this—what I mean is, you don’t know what it’s like,” Reggie was whining. “These people, they’re going to kill me if they think I’ve said anything. They’ll kill me even for being in here. Basically I am a fucking dead man. What you going to do about that?”
“We can’t offer you any sort of protection, Reggie,” Les was saying. “This isn’t the United States. We don’t have the facility to put you into any sort of scheme, and you really wouldn’t want that anyway, believe me.”
“I dunno. If I go inside, I’ll be dead in weeks.”
“You know we have a very good relationship with the Prison Service. They don’t want trouble for their prisoners, they’ve got enough to deal with. So they’re going to actively make sure you’re as safe in there as you can be. Right?”
She had watched this recording once already, taking notes for Jane and Les, who were about to start the second interview. Really this was Sam’s job, one she was particularly good at—finding the loose threads in an initial interview and knowing exactly how and when to give them a little tug. But Sam was busy writing up everything that had happened this morning, and Lou found herself planning interview strategy.
In Interview Room One, Scarlett Rainsford was awaiting her initial interview. She had spent the last few hours being checked over at the hospital, which had established that despite the threatened self-harm she was not actually in a crisis state and therefore was fit to be detained and interviewed.
Ali Whitmore and Caro Sumner were lined up for that one.
Juliette Rainsford was waiting her turn in a cell. Helen Bamber was going to interview her, with Ron Mitchell. The next briefing was planned for five pm, when all the interviewers and investigators would get together and discuss progress. Zoe Adams had managed to find a desk in the MIR, and was busy collating the intelligence with a view to producing charts to keep everyone up to speed with the next stage. They had suspects. Now it was all about getting enough evidence together to charge them, and, from there, achieving a successful prosecution.
Justice for Clive and Annie Rainsford, and Carl McVey.
“Ma’am? Can I have a quick word?” It was Jane Phelps.
“Sure. Have a seat,” Lou said.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I wondered if you could put me on another interview team. I know you’re pushed for officers, and I wouldn’t ask, only . . .”
“What is it, Jane?” Lou asked.
; Jane Phelps was one of her key officers. She had been in Major Crime for two years, and before that three years on Tactical CID, fighting crime and kicking doors in. Not that you’d think so to look at her: beautifully dressed, slightly built, a wide, generous smile—she looked as if she should be in sales, not hunting down violent criminals.
“It’s about Les. I just—I don’t like his way of talking to people.”
“You mean colleagues?”
“No, I mean, I realize he’s a bit insensitive sometimes, but I can deal with that. It’s the way he is with witnesses. We paid a visit to Darren Cunningham on Sunday afternoon, and Les said something that I thought was a bit out of order.”
“What did he say?”
“He told Darren Cunningham he should be careful who he trusted. Out of the blue. And something about knowing not being able to tell your enemies from your friends, when allegiances are changing all the time.”
Lou was scribbling notes. “Anything else?”
“Just that. It was very quick. After that we went straight back to the car, and I told him I thought what he’d said was almost threatening and I didn’t think it was the right thing to do. I said I thought he might have put Ian Palmer in danger.”
“And what did he say?”
“He laughed it off, he said he had seen crime groups fall apart just by putting a little word in. But what he also said was, how did I know he was talking about Palmer? And then, although it made me feel a bit uncomfortable, I didn’t think any more of it until this afternoon when I was in the interview with him, talking to Reggie Stark.”
Jane hesitated, as if remembering the other occasions when she’d stuck her neck out and been wrong. Lou could tell it had cost her, coming forward like this. She wasn’t enjoying it.
“Go on,” Lou said. “I’m listening.”
“You heard the bit earlier when Stark was explaining how he used to work for McDonnell and now he works for Cunningham. And you said yourself in this morning’s briefing that Stark might’ve been tasked with recovering the drugs from McVey.”
Jane hesitated, looked at her hands.
“You think he was warning Cunningham about Reggie?”
Jane said, “No—well, I don’t know. I don’t think it was that specific. But it felt weird at the time, like something was going on. I’m sorry to bother you with this, ma’am, I know it’s a pain. I just don’t like being a part of all that macho rubbish. I know we’ve already started, but I’d feel more comfortable working with someone else.”
Lou considered for a moment. “Leave it with me, Jane. What time are you going back in?”
“Half-past.”
When Jane had left, Lou stared at the scribbled notes on the pad in front of her. All she could think was, if Les had been talking about Reggie Stark and his changing allegiances on Sunday, how had he known? The team hadn’t even begun to consider Reggie for the McVey murder until yesterday. Without doubt Les was what she generously thought of as “old school,” possibly a bit on the lazy side when it came to taskings and not exactly proactive, but she’d never had cause to doubt his integrity. Not seriously.
Through the open door Lou saw Ron Mitchell coming back into the MIR carrying a sandwich and a can. “Ron!” she called. “Can I see you for a minute?”
“Ma’am?” Ron said, coming into her office.
“I need you to swap over to the Reggie Stark interview. Can you go and sit with Jane and catch up with what’s been tackled so far?”
“Of course.”
Ron left again. That part was easy. Les Finnegan wasn’t in the office, and his mobile phone went straight to voicemail. Lou pulled her jacket on and went through the door to the back of Headquarters, skirting the rear car park to the smokers’ shelter outside the force control room. From a hundred yards away she could see Les, loitering next to the shelter, talking on his mobile phone, smoking and kicking at the tufts of grass that were sprouting between the paving stones.
Lou had never had much faith in the copper’s gut instinct, preferring to put her trust in evidence, but that didn’t mean she never had a feel for when something was right or wrong. She always did. And being usually proved right was immaterial—that wasn’t how you conducted an investigation, how you got justice. Les had been a member of her team for long enough and she trusted him. And yet, probably in much the same way that Jane had been niggled by what Les had said to Cunningham, Lou found herself worrying at the thought like a broken tooth.
It wasn’t just what Jane had said. Lou remembered the way Les had been so evasive when she had tasked him with interviewing Nigel Maitland. Les had said he was on holiday, that he’d seen some intelligence about it. Lou had thought it strange at the time, since she made a point of reviewing every single thing that came in on Maitland, that she hadn’t seen it. The fact of the matter was that, until Jane had gone to Hermitage Farm and spoken to young Connor Petrie, nobody had known the Maitlands had gone away. Apart from Les.
And then, there had been that awkward phone conversation with Waterhouse.
I heard you’ve got a leak.
Les looked up, saw Lou heading toward him, and smiled.
LOU
Tuesday 5 November 2013, 17:25
Lou was waiting outside Buchanan’s office.
Only Sandra was there—was that her name? Lou craned her head to see if she could see her identity badge. Impossible. She could only just about make out the photo.
“Are you okay?” Sandra—or whatever her name was—asked. She stopped typing for a moment. “Can I get you anything?”
“No,” Lou said. “I’m fine, thanks. Will he be much longer?”
From the other side of the heavy wooden door, a burst of raucous male laughter erupted. Whatever they were doing in there, Lou concluded, they were enjoying themselves.
“Hope not; he’s supposed to be seeing the chief in half an hour.”
The door burst open and Buchanan emerged, shaking hands warmly with an older man in a suit, whom Lou didn’t recognize. They both looked very pleased with themselves, Lou thought miserably. She was exhausted, and feeling particularly uncharitable toward anyone who seemed to be having a good time when they should have been working at keeping the Queen’s Peace.
“Sir,” Lou said, getting up.
“Ah, Lou. Come in. Would you like a coffee? Sharon, can you get . . .”
“I’m fine, sir, thanks.” Sharon. Of course.
Lou stood in front of the desk, waiting to be offered a seat. She always did this, and he always seemed surprised. Maybe nobody else waited anymore.
“Do sit. How are you feeling? I’m hearing you’ve had a good result with Op Vanguard today.”
“Yes, I think you could call it that.”
“And your sergeant? Sam Hollands, isn’t it?”
“She’s—not doing too badly. She has some hours on her card; I’ve insisted that she take some time off.”
“She did an excellent job, truly excellent. What about the girl?”
Woman, Sam thought, gritting her teeth. She’s twenty-five and she’s lived a whole bloody lifetime, she deserves to be considered an adult.
“Scarlett Rainsford and her sister have both been arrested, sir. Interviews are ongoing, but we have enough for a charge.”
Buchanan leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his small neat belly. “I had a chat with Rob Jefferson this afternoon. He reports there is forensic evidence linking Stark to items found in Rainsford’s car, and the shoe mark from the trainers they recovered was a match for that other murder—what’s his name?”
“McVey, sir.”
“McVey, that’s it, as well as the double murder.”
Double murder. That made it a better result, didn’t it? Annie had died a few hours ago, quietly, without ever regaining consciousness, without ever knowing that her daughter had paid for her to be killed next to her husband—paid for their deaths with the meager profit obtained from burgling their own house.
“And Stark
has confessed?”
“Yes, sir. Seems quite keen to go inside, in the end. He’s clearly terrified of Cunningham. He seems to believe that Cunningham blames him for failing to recover the drugs that were stolen from Palmer the night he was attacked.”
“You think the McDonnells have the drugs?”
“We’ve got a warrant for tomorrow morning for all the properties we know are controlled by Lewis McDonnell. We have some good intelligence that McDonnell has taken delivery of a shipment of cocaine and is planning to move it next week. We think it’s probably the same batch that Cunningham was supposed to receive in September. I think it’s safer to do a warrant rather than rely on intelligence to tell us when and where it’s going to be transferred.”
“Good to hear. I remember you telling me that we were going to be able to dismantle some of the networks. Do you still think that’s a realistic prospect?”
Complete dismantling of a criminal network was something that happened only very rarely and Lou often thought of it as rather like trying to get rid of an infestation of troublesome vermin. If you attacked one part of the group, then very rapidly leaks would be plugged, resources moved, people silenced, strategies changed. Within hours everything you knew about the network would be out of date and useless. The only tactic that ever worked was patience, biding your time until you could take out the whole thing in one go. But she knew what Buchanan wanted to hear.
“Yes,” she said, “I really hope so.”
“And the trafficking?”
“I’ll leave that to Special Branch, sir.”
“Good, good. Are you around next week? We should have a lunch, or something. Proper catch-up.”
A bloody lunch! No, thanks.
“Actually, sir, I was thinking I might take a couple of days’ annual leave.”
“Ah! Well, you deserve it. A good result, Lou, a really good result.”
A few minutes later, heading out into the cold corridor again. “Thanks, Sharon,” Lou said.
“Have a nice evening.”
“You too.”