Everyone Lies (41 page)

He nodded. ‘She could have gone home, made a life for herself – a bright, resourceful young woman like that. But then Rika’s death would go unpunished.’ His face seemed calm, but a muscle in his jaw worked.

Suzie
, she thought. In a way, every investigation, every case he worked on was about Suzie.‘Let’s see if we can finish what Marta came here to do,’ she said quietly.

She scrolled down her contacts list to Josh Brown and switched to speakerphone. ‘Marta Aizupiete,’ she said, spelling the surname. ‘She was a sociology student at Manchester Metropolitan University.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Want me to look up her records?’

‘No, I want you to talk to her friends.’ She hesitated. Strictly speaking, she should put this in the hands of a Family Liaison Officer. ‘Josh, what I’m asking you to do is highly irregular …’

‘Not a problem,’ he said. ‘Just tell me what you need.’

‘Ask about her, find out if she told anyone about her background, but
do not
let them know what happened to her. Josh, it’s possible Renwick got there before us, so suspicions could already be aroused—’

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll get hold of a teaching schedule – I’m a friend from London, looking her up. Got her address?’

Kate read it to him from one of the sheets the admin officer had copied for them.

‘Got it – I’ll say I went there and couldn’t get an answer.’

‘Well.’ She glanced at Fennimore as she disconnected. ‘Young Josh is a natural at this.’

Fennimore gave her a wry smile. ‘I think Josh has had a bit of practice when it comes to reinventing himself.’

She turned in her seat. ‘What does that mean?’

He shrugged. ‘Just a feeling.’

Simms nodded to herself; a cop’s curiosity wasn’t always welcome.

She kept quiet until they approached the wide junction at the end of Cheetham Hill Road. From there, she gave him directions, guiding him anticlockwise onto a grey, high-walled section of the Mancunian Way. When she’d first moved north to Manchester, Simms had no cosy notion of narrow streets of terraced houses and neighbours chatting on doorsteps, but she hadn’t expected something quite on the scale of the city’s urban sprawl either. At Castlefield the road opened up onto a vista of leafless trees and scrubby grass; in the distance, they caught glimpses of Beetham Tower, the forty-seven-floor skyscraper looking like an impossibly tall slab of marble, reflecting the greys and whites of the sky, the penthouse wreathed in a lingering mist. They took the first left off the roundabout and drove past a student apartment block on the left.

Marta had rented a two-bed furnished apartment across the road in a Victorian Mill conversion – four-star accommodation at about double the rental on a student flat yet only five minutes’ walk from the university. The place was secure on their arrival. Kate had contacted the flat owner, who had an apartment in the same building.

‘Marta’s a good tenant,’ he said. ‘No noise, no visitors that I know of. Pays her rent, cash every month. I didn’t like it at first – cash seems a bit iffy, doesn’t it? But she paid three months’ deposit upfront and she’s
never
been late – not even a day, not once in ten months. She’s a
nice
girl, Chief Inspector. I don’t know what you think she’s done, but—’

‘Sir,’ Simms said gently. ‘Marta is dead. She was murdered.’

His eyes watered suddenly and he made a small noise at the back of his throat. ‘Marta?’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

She nodded and he placed the key in her gloved hand, then she asked him to take a step back. He stood to the side of the door and turned away for a second, wiping his face with the back of his hand.

Kate unlocked the door and swung it wide, remaining in the hallway. She looked at Fennimore and he said, ‘I think we both expected this.’

‘What?’ the landlord demanded. ‘Expected what?’ He crowded forward looking over her shoulder.

‘Fucking hell!’

The place was a mess. Furniture overturned, cushions ripped apart, their stuffing feathering every surface. Books had been pulled out from the bookshelf, spines ripped off. There was no TV – removed at her request, the landlord said. A CD player was intact, but every disc had been taken. At the far end of the open-plan living space, every drawer, cupboard and shelf in the kitchen had been emptied. Rice, cereal, biscuits and dried pasta lay strewn across the floor and work surfaces, tipped out of their packs. Drawers were turned upside down, even the washing machine had been dragged away from the wall.

‘Thorough,’ Fennimore said.

Simms nodded. ‘Now I know why Renwick missed the lunchtime briefing on Wednesday.’

The landlord made a move to enter, but she turned and eased him back. ‘Sir,’ she said. ‘This is a crime scene. You can’t go in.’

There was no laptop, memory stick or external drive in the flat. Fennimore and Simms left the Crime Scene Unit to it and headed back to the Midland Hotel for an unofficial debrief of her unofficial team. The police constable on the door had been told to admit no one but the CSIs.

‘He’s been ahead of me every step,’ Simms said. ‘I thought I was doing him a favour, giving him a chance to prove himself. He’s been messing with the evidence and laughing behind his hand with every supposed foul-up.’

Unexpectedly, Fennimore smiled.

‘Oh, you think this
funny
, Professor?’

‘You know Locard’s Principle – “Every contact leaves a trace.”’

‘Even when you break in to
steal
evidence?’ she said gloomily, irritated by his good mood.

‘Sometimes especially then,’ he said. ‘You would think he’d be especially careful, wouldn’t you? But he trashed the place.’

‘He was panicked or angry, or both,’ Simms said.

‘Which means he made mistakes.’

‘He’s a cop, Nick – he’s forensically aware.’

‘Police always
think
they know more than they do,’ he said. ‘If he was there, the CSIs will find him.’

42

‘Everybody lies.’

DR GREG HOUSE

They got back to Fennimore’s hotel just after midday. His suite was decked out like an incident room. His laptop stood open on a circular dining table, a flipchart lying open next to it was covered in notes, diagrams and doodles; on a whiteboard, mounted on a couple of easels, he had mindmapped the investigation as it currently stood. Hung on a stand next to it, a second flipchart summarized the mindmap in bullet points. A drift of scrapped flipchart sheets from previous attempts lay curled and scrolled against the far wall.

Josh sat in one of the armchairs, his laptop on his knee, a combined printer and flatbed scanner perched on a stack of printer paper on the coffee table in front of him. His smart-phone was in his hand and he appeared to be texting. He looked up, lifted his chin in greeting, his thumbs still moving over the touch screen. The blinds were closed – a precaution in case any of the journalists who had dogged them the previous day had failed to get the message and bribed their way into one of the buildings opposite.

Simms moved straight to the whiteboard; it was an explosion of colour.

Fennimore stood next to her. ‘Didn’t sleep too well last night,’ he said.

Minutes after he reconnected his hotel landline, Fennimore had received an angry call from his in-laws; they had been trying to reach him all day. Rachel’s father described the Facebook page as ‘a stunt’, and called Fennimore a selfish, self-obsessed bastard. It was true: it hadn’t even occurred to him to consult with Rachel’s parents or even warn them of what he was about to do. He’d meant to apologize, but heard himself say, ‘I’m trying to find my daughter.’

Rachel’s mother came on the line, her voice raw with anger and tears. ‘It’s all about you, isn’t it, Nick? Well, we lost a daughter, too.’

He shook himself free of the memory and looked at Simms; she was engrossed, studying the swirling complexity of lines on the mindmap. Fennimore left her to it, and turned to Josh.

‘Did you make contact with any of Marta’s friends?’ he asked.

Josh nodded. ‘She was in her second year – told everyone she was Russian – on a placement from a university in Moscow. She attended lectures regularly; was a bit of a live wire in tutorials; had strong opinions and wasn’t shy of expressing them.’

‘Contentious, or assertive?’

‘Everyone I spoke to seemed to like her. Her grades were pretty stellar, but she got on with the rest. One of her mates told me she was aiming for a first. They were a bit mystified by her though—’

There was a knock at the door and Kate checked through the peephole. ‘It’s Ella Moran,’ she said, cutting across what Josh was saying. ‘This will keep till later.’

Fennimore began to question her.

‘
Later
, Nick.’ Her tone brooked no argument.

She opened the door and Moran came in looking flushed and excited. ‘I’m supposed to be at the cemetery, checking up on Rika,’ she said. ‘Sergeant Renwick told me to get down there pronto.’

Simms told her what they’d discovered about Rika and Marta, and about the break-in at Marta’s apartment.

‘So, what do I tell Sarge?’

‘Everything I’ve told you,’ Simms said. ‘Just tell him I’d got there ahead of you.’

‘Okay.’

Fennimore waited for her to say that Renwick had gathered the same information at least a day earlier, that they suspected him of the break-in, but Simms said, ‘How are you getting on with Marta’s calls log?’

‘Caller ID was blocked on a few,’ Moran said. ‘But I’ve got names for most of them, now.’

‘Good. Email it when you get back to base.’ Kate turned to Fennimore. ‘Can we use your email address?’

He gave Moran a business card.

‘She also had multiple calls from a throwdown.’ Moran handed over her notebook, and Simms copied the number down.

Simms turned to Fennimore. ‘Is there any way to trace this?’

He glared at her, but she gazed calmly back at him and, eventually, he said, ‘Pay cash for a SIM free phone and you’re basically off-grid. With an unlocked phone, you could swap providers every few days if you wanted – most garages and supermarkets sell pay-as-you-go SIM cards. It would be virtually untraceable.’

‘I
know
that, Nick,’ she said. ‘I’m asking if we can set up a trace and ring the number?’

‘
If
he still has the phone,
and
he’s still using the same SIM card,
and
you could get clearance to do a trace,
and
keep him on the phone long enough? Well, then, yes, I suppose you could probably triangulate his position. But by the time you get there, he would probably have dumped the phone and walked quietly away.’

Moran looked from Fennimore to Simms. ‘Is everything okay?’

Simms gave a tight smile. ‘Just tired and tetchy.’

Moran nodded, sympathetic as always, though she looked like she’d never lost a night’s sleep in her life.

Simms jerked her chin towards the scanner on the table next to Josh Brown. ‘Does that thing do photocopies?’

‘Sure,’ Josh said. ‘What d’you need?’

She handed over the forms they had picked up at the cemetery office; Fennimore noticed she held back the student ID.

‘Go to Marta’s flat,’ Simms said, as Moran tucked the copied sheets into her shoulder bag. ‘Get yourself noticed by the CSIs, quiz the uniform on duty about what happened, and make sure he tells you that I am the SIO – I don’t want anyone thinking you’re already working with me. Then take these back to the station as proof you went to Blackley. Tell DS Renwick we’ve got a definite ID, and make sure the Latvian embassy is informed. Spry will arrange for a Family Liaison Officer and interpreter to talk to the family.’

‘That’ll take ninety minutes, tops – what’ll I do with the rest of the day?’

‘Just send me the phone log, but keep it out of sight of Renwick.’

‘Kate,’ Fennimore said, and she frowned, gave her head a little shake as if to say,
Not now
.

She saw Moran out.

As soon as the door closed, he said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I’m protecting her, Nick.’

‘You’re keeping her in the dark.’

‘Renwick has been playing with us all along, but this one time I’m a step ahead of him because, right now, Renwick doesn’t know he’s a suspect. If I tell Moran everything we know, it will put her in an impossible position. What if she lets something slip? What if she just looks at him the wrong way and he decides she’s a threat?’

‘She’s already hiding the phone log from him.’

‘She’s holding back a lead; every cop does that at some time or other. But the cemetery, the break-in – they say Renwick is dirty. I can’t expect her to go back into the office and deal with that on her own.’

‘She is,’ he said. ‘She just doesn’t know it.’

She frowned. ‘I’m sorry, Nick – it’s the best I can do.’

‘If it helps, I don’t think Renwick’s been near her university friends,’ Josh said. ‘They’re assuming she’s had a family emergency and gone home.’

‘
Nobody
was worried about her?’ Simms asked.

‘Like I said, Marta was a bit of a mystery. None of her friends even knew where she was living in Manchester, and one of them lived in a block of flats opposite hers.’

Fennimore had listened to this with half an ear, but now he went off in an entirely different direction. ‘Why didn’t he go to the university?’

‘Who?’ Simms said.

‘Renwick. He has a copy of Marta’s student card, yet he hasn’t visited the campus.’

Simms shrugged. ‘He couldn’t blend in like Josh. He’d have to say he was police, and that would attract attention – questions would be asked.’ She groaned as another possibility came to her. ‘Or he’s already got everything he needs.’

A knock at the door turned out to be Parrish. He was wearing a beanie hat pulled low over his brow and a camouflage-print hoody, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket. He came into the room fast and back-heeled the door shut.

‘This is really, seriously fucked up.’ He snatched the beanie off his head and rubbed his close crop of hair, then noticed Josh for the first time. ‘Who are you?’ He turned to Simms and pointed at Josh, hat in hand. ‘Who the fuck is
he
?’