‘Eh?’ James gasped. ‘I wish. All we did is snog and fall asleep.’
‘Yeah,’ Hannah giggled. ‘But I want to see if I can make Dad’s head explode.’
James started to crack up. ‘You’re insane, Hannah. Whatever you tell him, don’t bring my name into it. I don’t want him bursting in on me and trying to chop me up with a machete or something.’
‘I wouldn’t worry on that score. My dad’s got little cocktail-stick legs and a big potbelly. After the way you demolished those two thugs on Saturday night, I’ll be betting my pocket money on you if a fight breaks out.’
‘That’s if your dad ever reinstates your pocket money,’ James grinned, as he gave Hannah a goodbye kiss. ‘I’ll give you a call later,’ he yelled as he rushed off to use the toilet. ‘Have fun at the pool.’
27. BREAKING
Dave had been out food shopping the night before. He was at the table eating scrambled eggs on toast when James got in.
‘Hey stud,’ Dave grinned. ‘How’d the night of passion go?’
James grabbed the milk from the fridge and started drinking out of the carton. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Got a quality feel up her shirt.’
‘Nice one,’ Dave grinned.
‘So, is Sonya around?’
Dave shrugged. ‘Typical woman. At first she’s all over me, now she keeps texting me and asking if I really care about her.’
‘Which of course you don’t,’ James said, as he swiped a triangle of Dave’s toast.
‘Hey, you’ve got all morning to make your own breakfast,’ Dave said bitterly. ‘I’ve got to go off to work in a minute.’
James spotted a brown paper file on the kitchen worktop and stepped over to it. ‘What’s this?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Dave said. ‘It’s a copy of the police paperwork relating to Will Clarke’s death. John’s assistant Chloe delivered it last night, not long after you left. You’d better read it through, but I’d wait till after breakfast if you’ve got a weak stomach.’
James flipped the file open and was confronted by an A4 photograph of Will’s mangled body.
‘Oh …’ James gasped. ‘That is so nasty.’
Dave nodded. ‘Your girlfriend must have felt one hell of a jolt.’
On second glance, James had a brainwave. ‘Hang on,’ he said, holding the photo close to his face and carefully studying Will’s injuries.
‘What?’
‘Last night, Hannah told me that Michael Patel was on the scene within a minute of Will going ker-splat.’
‘We know,’ Dave nodded. ‘You’ll see it in the file when you read it.’
‘Right,’ James said. ‘But Hannah also said that Michael walked up to the body and touched it. She thought Patel was checking to see if Will was still alive, but look at that picture. His body’s practically decapitated. You didn’t need to start poking Will about to work out that he’s a goner.’
Dave looked surprised. ‘Hannah definitely told you Michael touched the body?’
‘Hundred per cent, Dave. And what do they teach us in basic training? Never touch anything at a crime scene because it could contaminate the evidence and ruin the chances of a successful prosecution. So why would an experienced police officer wade into a possible murder scene like that?’
Dave put in a few seconds’ thought before replying. ‘OK, so we can place Michael on the scene shortly after Will died and he was behaving oddly. For argument’s sake, let’s suppose that Michael did push Will off the rooftop and try to suss out how it could have happened.’
‘OK,’ James said. ‘For starters, you don’t just bump into someone on a rooftop. Michael and Will must have arranged to meet up there. Presumably it was to do with the casino robbery, but I can hardly see Michael planning to kill someone by pushing them off a rooftop in broad daylight.’
‘Too right,’ Dave nodded. ‘It’s not even high up. Will might even have survived if he hadn’t hit the stair rail before the ground. Some sort of row must have broken out and Michael ended up pushing Will off. Michael would have climbed down the ladder and moved away as quickly as possible. He would have been worried that there was a witness: someone down on the ground, or someone looking out of a window in one of the other blocks.’
‘I know,’ James gasped, as an idea fitted together in his head. ‘Patel must have been trying to cover up the forensic evidence.’
Dave looked confused. ‘How do you figure that?’
‘After fighting with Will, Michael must have had traces of Will’s blood, clothes fibres and DNA all over his uniform, right?’
Dave nodded.
‘But he’d be able to explain all of that forensic evidence away if people saw him touching Will’s dead body on the ground.’
Dave broke into a smile. ‘Riiiiiight, James, I get what you’re saying. If Patel got put on trial for murder, he’d be able to claim that he got Will’s DNA on him when he touched the body to make sure that he was dead. With the forensic evidence discredited, the case would boil down to Patel’s word, against the word of an eyewitness standing at least fifty metres away.
‘In the end, Michael needn’t have worried because nobody saw anything and everyone assumed Will fell off, or topped himself. But at the time, Patel must have been terrified that there was going to be a full-scale murder investigation, with him covered in forensic evidence and fitting the description of the main suspect.’
‘Exactly,’ James nodded. ‘What reason could there be for an experienced cop to contaminate a crime scene, except to cover his own butt?’
Dave shrugged. ‘There’s none that spring to mind.’
‘So is this just a theory?’ James asked. ‘Or do you really think Michael Patel killed Will Clarke?’
‘There’s too many variables to be sure of anything,’ Dave said, as he glanced at his watch and stood up sharply. ‘But it does fit all the facts.
‘Anyway, James, it’s only my second day on the job, so I’d better not turn up late. Go in your room, read the file to see if you can pick anything else up, then give John a bell. Tell him what you learned off Hannah and run our theory about why Patel touched the body past him.’
James nodded. ‘OK.’
Dave added his empty mug and plate to the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink. ‘At the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter if the theory’s right or wrong. I doubt we’ll ever be able to prove anything: it all happened more than a year ago, there were no eyewitnesses and Will’s body has been cremated.’
‘So why bother carrying on?’ James asked sourly.
‘The robbery,’ Dave said as he headed for the door. ‘That’s why we came here in the first place and if we can get more evidence linking Michael and Leon to the robbery, they’ll both be going down for a long stretch.’
‘I guess,’ James said, opening the fridge door and grabbing a couple of eggs. ‘But it’s bogus if they end up getting away with murder.’
*
John was pulling on to a roundabout when his mobile started ringing. He had Lauren and Kerry in the back.
‘Answer that, will you?’ John said. ‘I’ve gotta concentrate here.’
Lauren grabbed John’s wireless headset off the console between the front seats and hooked it over her ear. ‘Hi James, how are you?’
James was pleasantly surprised to hear his sister’s voice. ‘Hey Lauren, how was the hostel?’
‘Mental,’ Lauren grinned. ‘We had the best laugh ever, better even than last year. Me and Bethany nearly got sent home for nicking some boys’ clothes while they were skinny-dipping in the lake. Kyle got the neck brace off, then busted his ankle on some bet that he could jump his skateboard over two cars. Jake and a couple of his mates demolished a jet ski by driving it into rocks. There was total craziness, every single day.’
‘Sounds nutty,’ James said, resenting the fact that he’d missed out. ‘So is John on another call? What are you doing in his office?’
‘You diverted through to his mobile. I’m in hi
s car with Kerry. John asked for extra resources, so we’re on the same mission as you now.’
James was shocked. ‘Really, doing what?’
‘Breaking and entering,’ Lauren said. ‘The house belongs to some guy called Michael Patel.’
‘Right,’ James nodded. ‘I know who he is.’
‘You should see us James. Me and Kerry are dressed up like bad girls. I’ve got these grubby white Reeboks, a tracksuit, big earrings and a ton of makeup. We look rough! And we’re doing your favourite.’
‘Oh,’ James gasped. ‘They’re letting you vandalise the place?’
Lauren grabbed her mission briefing out of her tracksuit top and read James an excerpt. ‘Agents must make copies of financial documents, computer data and other personal papers belonging to Michael and Patricia Patel. In order to minimise suspicion, the agents must give the impression of being petty child burglars by damaging property and stealing small items.’
‘You’re so jammy,’ James said. ‘Do you know how long it’s been since I got to trash anything?’
‘Kerry’s sitting next to me, do you want a quick word with her? … Oh, wait, she’s shaking her head. It looks like she’s still blanking you.’
James had been enjoying the conversation, but didn’t appreciate being reminded that he was still a leper on campus.
‘John’s pulled on to the motorway now and he’s nodding. I’ll pass the headset across.’
James heard a few bumps and rustles before John’s voice rang out. ‘Good morning, young man. What have you got to tell me?’
*
It was an hour later when John pulled the Vauxhall up at the end of Michael Patel’s street.
He looked back at the two girls. ‘Good luck. I checked with Millie and Michael is definitely on duty this morning. Patricia ought to be at a mother and toddler group, but ring the doorbell to be on the safe side. If things go pear-shaped and you end up getting nicked, just keep your traps firmly shut and I’ll get you out as fast as I can.’
‘No worries, John,’ Kerry said, as she joined Lauren on the pavement and slammed the car door.
It was a bright morning. Kerry and Lauren exchanged a grin as they set off down the road. The Patels’ 1930s-built house was a dump. There were no cars on the crazy-paved driveway and a ring of the doorbell confirmed that nobody was home.
Kerry pulled a crowbar out of her backpack and thrust it through the narrow glass panel beside the front door. It made a hell of a racket and the girls looked around edgily, making sure they hadn’t attracted any attention from the neighbours.
They slid thick gardening gloves over their plastic disposables, then carefully pulled away all the glass shards jutting from the window frame, so that Lauren didn’t get cut as she clambered through.
‘It’s smaller than it looked in that surveillance picture,’ Lauren said edgily.
‘It’ll be OK,’ Kerry smiled. ‘You’re not that big.’
Lauren put her arms and shoulders through the window frame. Kerry picked Lauren up by her ankles and fed her through, only letting go when her hands were touching the carpet inside the house.
Lauren stood up, but nearly fell back down again as she stepped on a wind-up car and twisted her ankle. The hallway walls were covered in scratches and grubby handprints and the smell of stale cigarette smoke lingered in the air. Lauren tried letting Kerry in through the front door, but it was deadlocked.
She crouched down and shouted through the letterbox. ‘I won’t bother picking it. It’s easier if I let you in around the side.’
Lauren walked through to the living-room. She undid a catch and pulled open the central sash of the bay window.
‘Cheers,’ Kerry said, as she straddled through. ‘Millie said the computer was upstairs in the back bedroom when she baby-sat. You copy everything off that and I’ll start hunting for paperwork.’
‘Aye aye, captain,’ Lauren said, as she ran off up the stairs.
The computer was covered in crayon and there was sticky orange stuff all over the keyboard, which Lauren hoped was juice. It struck her that the Patels were slobs; definitely not the kind of people who organised household accounts or other valuable data on their computer.
Downstairs, Kerry had found a mountain of unfiled paperwork in a living-room cupboard. She had a high-speed document scanner in her backpack, but she realised it would take hours to copy every piece of paper, particularly as loads of them were still in their delivery envelopes accompanied by leaflets offering low-interest loans and discount car insurance.
Lauren looked through the program menu and found nothing but a bunch of games for pre-school kids. It took her under a minute to put everything from the computer on to a flash memory drive, then she ripped the power leads out of the back before shoving the monitor off the side of the desk. After that she yanked out the keyboard and used it to batter books and ornaments off two shelves, before swinging it above her head and demolishing a paper lampshade.
She checked the drawers built into the computer desk for documents, then moved into the bathroom. She grabbed the shower gel, shampoo and toothpaste in turn and squirted them across the floor and up the walls. Then she found a lipstick and wrote on the bathroom mirror: HOPE U ENJOY CLEARING UP MY MESS with a smiley face underneath it.
There was a jewellery box in the main bedroom. Lauren stuffed her tracksuit pockets with Patricia’s collection of brooches and rings, before opening up her wardrobe and ripping all the clothes off their hangers. She found a couple of credit cards and about a hundred pounds cash in the cabinet on Michael’s side of the bed. After a further rummage, she uncovered a little bag of white powder that was probably cocaine.
‘Aren’t you a naughty boy,’ Lauren grinned, as she ripped the small drawer off its runners and hurtled its contents across the room.
Next, she opened up Michael’s wardrobe, which contained half a dozen sets of police uniform in dry-cleaners’ bags. She shot everything out of the sock and underwear cubbies, before she spotted a small safe bolted to the wall with three pairs of polished shoes standing on top of it. Lauren hadn’t studied safe cracking and didn’t have tools with her even if she had, but she knew CHERUB might want to send someone back for another look.
She cleared a space around the chunky metal box, then slid out her digital camera and took two photographs. The first was of the front of the safe. The second was a close-up of the sticker on top that had the name of the manufacturer and the serial number on it.
After a brief rummage through a chest of drawers, Lauren moved to the final room on the upper floor: the bedroom where the Patels’ daughter, Charlotte, slept. She tipped out a few boxes of toys and games, but didn’t have the heart to smash up the property of a three-year-old and headed back downstairs to find Kerry. She was kneeling on the living-room floor surrounded by piles of paperwork.
‘I don’t know how long we’ve got,’ Kerry gasped, as she ran the portable document scanner over a credit-card statement, before hurriedly folding it and stuffing it back in an envelope. ‘But we won’t get all this junk copied, even if the Patels stay out till midnight.’
Lauren knelt down beside Kerry.
‘Help me sift through,’ Kerry said. ‘We want credit-card statements, bank statements, phone bills, large invoices. Ignore the rubbish, like gym memberships and stuff.’
For the next hour, the girls were like robots, repeating the same task until their backs and shoulders hurt. Lauren sifted through documents. Anything that looked interesting got put into a pile for Kerry to copy with the handheld scanner.
The other eighty per cent got stuffed back into the cupboard. The sorted pile was twice the size of the unsorted when John Jones called from his car at the top of the road. Kerry grabbed her mobile.
‘I don’t know what you ladies are still playing at, but Mrs P. has turned into the top of the road.’
‘Roger that John, we’re out of here.’
Kerry snapped her phone shut, jumped up and began stuffing the d
ocument scanner into her pack. Lauren kicked the papers around the room, upended the coffee table and stole a couple of DVDs. They were about to step out through the bay window when they spotted Patricia pulling up the driveway in a silver BMW.
‘Tits,’ Kerry said. ‘We’ll have to go out the back.’
The girls sprinted through to the kitchen. Kerry pulled down on the back-door handle, but the door on to the garden was deadlocked, just like the one at the front. Lauren reached across a kitchen cabinet and swung open a window as Patricia Patel screamed at her daughter:
‘Charlotte, no, sharp. Please don’t touch that, baby, it’s broken glass.’
Lauren glided across the kitchen cabinet, passed through the open window and dropped on to the Patels’ shabby back lawn. Kerry followed a couple of seconds later. The garden was surrounded by overgrown bushes and a high wooden fence, which meant the only easy way out was around the side of the house.
As the girls moved, they could hear Patricia sobbing into a mobile phone. ‘… I don’t know, honey. I daren’t go inside, they might still be in there. I can see paper all over the living-room and I think I heard some noise … OK, I’ll call the police. But you’re coming right home, aren’t you, Michael?’
They poked their heads around the front of the house. The sight of Patricia crying and the bewildered toddler staring up at her mother made both girls feel rotten. Patricia hung up on her husband and dialled 999, as Kerry leaned against the side of the house and whispered to Lauren:
‘I don’t think she’ll chase us. She’s can’t abandon the kid.’
Lauren nodded. ‘OK, let’s run for it.’
The two tracksuit-clad girls sprinted out from the side of the house, passing within a couple of metres of Patricia’s grasp.
‘Oh my god, they’re right here,’ Patricia yelled into the phone, as Lauren and Kerry turned left and began sprinting towards the top of the road. ‘Can you send a car quickly? They’re two girls with long black hair, and they’re running towards the top of Tremaine Road, right now.’
John was parked around the corner in the next street with the back door of the car open. The girls clambered inside.