Everyone Lies (46 page)

‘And it’s literally gone up in smoke.’

‘Yeah, but you got a squint at the notebook.’

‘A couple of minutes, that’s all.’

‘Your powers of recall are a bit of a legend, aren’t they?’ Josh said, with a sly sideways glance.

‘Well …’ Fennimore said modestly.

Josh opened his laptop and propped it on the coffee table where they could both see what he was typing. Fennimore humoured him, reciting snippets of information – a few dates and delivery times; a van registration number; the address of the mixer named ‘Bug’ – while Josh typed them into a Word file.

‘None of this is any good without Marta or DC Parrish around to corroborate it, of course,’ Fennimore said.

‘What about the photograph?’ Josh countered. ‘Two of you saw that – Kate said it was Tanford, and Marta knew him as the fixer called “Rob”.’

‘A photograph of a cop in a knocking shop isn’t what you’d call damning evidence, Josh.’

‘All right, so we sit on this Bug’s place. Gather evidence of deliveries and that.’

‘Josh,’ Fennimore said. ‘We’re not police, and anyway, we haven’t the resources for twenty-four-hour surveillance – it could take months.’

‘Okay,’ Josh said, his brows drawing down in frustration. ‘Give me something I
can
investigate.’

‘I’ve given you everything I can recall.’

Josh’s head came up. He looked at Fennimore, his head on one side, as though straining to hear something. He had grey-blue eyes, which habitually wore a guarded expression, but right now, Fennimore saw a flash of elation.

‘You’re in Kate’s car,’ he said. ‘You’ve just picked up the stuff out of Marta’s locker. How d’you feel?’

‘How do I
feel
?’ Fennimore looked askance at him. ‘Is this a cognitive interview, Josh?’

He shrugged. ‘I did a bit on my undergrad course – it works.’

‘I know it does.’ Cognitive interviewing improved recall by up to 35 per cent on standard interviews, and many police forces now used the technique. Context and state of mind were both important in unlocking memories – hence Josh’s attempt to place him back in the car, and the question about how he felt.

Always up to try something new, Fennimore closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself back in Kate Simms’s car.

‘Kate’s driving. My hands are tingling – adrenaline – I’m excited. I’m flipping through the notebook, thinking,
We’ve got the bastard
. Oh—’ He opened his eyes.

‘Yes?’

‘There was a sketch – of Bug – looked mad as a badger … I can’t believe I forgot that. It startled me, and Kate leaned across to get a look.’
Jasmine,
he thought.
She smelled of jasmine.

Josh was looking at him. ‘And?’

‘Nothing … just, she … Nothing, it’s not important.’

‘Come on, Nick. You know everything’s important in a cognitive interview.’

‘It does not relate to the case,’ Fennimore said firmly.

‘Oo-kaay,’ Josh said. ‘Tell me about the notebook.’

‘Plain – black, A5.’ He made a circular motion with his finger. ‘With a red elasticated strap.’ He felt a sudden surge of excitement – he’d just remembered something else. ‘It held Tanford’s photo in place. Under it she’d written …’ He stared ahead and saw it as clearly as if it was in his hands: ‘Black ink, the numbers 1211, a “less than” symbol, number 4, dash, 19.’

Josh typed it in and swivelled the laptop for him to see. ‘Like this?’

1211<4-19

‘That’s it,’ Fennimore said.

‘What does it mean?’

Fennimore shook his head. ‘Haven’t a clue.’

‘Well, obviously 1211
isn’t
less than 4,’ Josh said. ‘And it
definitely
isn’t less than 4 minus 19.’

They stared at it for a few more minutes.

‘Anything?’ Josh said.

Fennimore frowned. ‘I feel like the number nineteen should mean something, but I can’t quite recall …’ He strained to remember. ‘No,’ he said, defeated. ‘Nothing.’

Josh shrugged. ‘When in doubt, Google.’

There was a fire extinguisher numbered 1211-4; several military campaigns happened across medieval Europe in 1211, a US Senate Bill on telecoms fees was numbered 1211. None of these seemed relevant.

Josh clicked on the next search result: AD-1211, an opioid analgesic. ‘Did they cut the drugs with opioids?’ he asked.

‘No – methaqualone at source, penicillin here in the UK.’ Fennimore stared at the digits, trying to make sense of them. ‘If they were letters, you might think they meant something in Cyrillic, but numbers?’

‘If the numbers corresponded to letters of the alphabet,’ Josh said, thinking aloud, but they got ADAA

‘What about a car registration?’ Josh said.

Fennimore pondered. ‘Numbers
are
used to substitute for letters … But I don’t see how the “less than” symbol fits.’

‘Here.’ Josh maximized the document file he’d been working on, highlighted the figures, clicked on the font dialogue box and scrolled back and forth through the fonts.

Fennimore caught a tantalizing flash of something in the preview box. ‘Wait a minute. Scroll back.’

Josh obliged, peering at the screen, trying to see what Fennimore had seen.

‘Whoa,’ Fennimore said. ‘Go back one font type.’

The preview stopped at Edwardian Script ITC. The numbers read:
1211<4–19
.

He squinted at it. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

Josh shook his head slowly.

‘I think you’re right,’ he said, newly energized. ‘Run the number one and the two together, you get “R”.’

‘Oh,’ Josh said. ‘And the one and the “less than” symbol make a “k”.’ He opened the font dialogue box again and fiddled with the character spacing. ‘Here.’ He turned the laptop to show Fennimore. He had shuffled the first two digits closer, and the angle of the “less than” symbol now almost touched the digit before:
1211<4-19
.

‘Rika-19,’ Josh said and laughed. ‘A password, maybe? But why 19?’

The inscription on Rika’s headstone flashed into Fennimore’s head – now the 19 made sense. ‘Rika was nineteen years old when she died,’ he said.

Josh grinned. ‘It
is
a password.’ He stared avidly at the screen. ‘But what for?’

Fennimore thought he already knew, but he enjoyed watching his student make the connection. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Marta
did
hide her notebook and flash drive at the university …’

A slow smile spread across the younger man’s face. ‘F: drive.’

*

Fennimore rang Kate Simms from his mobile.

‘Nick, I can’t talk,’ she said.

A bolt of alarm shot through him. ‘Has something happened?’

Her laugh sounded a bit ragged. ‘Only that I missed my meeting by about two hours. I’ve just been summoned to the Chief Constable’s office. Spry told me to prepare for the worst.’

He exhaled in a rush, grateful at least that she wasn’t in physical danger. ‘Look, Kate,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve found something.’

‘No, Nick, don’t start this all over again.’

‘Students at universities are given their own small partition on the computer’s main server,’ he pushed on. ‘It’s called the F: Drive. Students have their own username and password – so it’s a secure, private little corner of the university computer system, just for them.’

‘Nick, I haven’t got time for this,’ she said. ‘I’m about to get in the car.’

‘Wait,’ he insisted, desperate to make her listen. ‘Marta was careful – she made back-ups – the flash drive she kept in her locker, the notebook. Kate, I think she might have backed up the evidence on her partition of the F: Drive at the university.’

‘Jesus, Fennimore, will you
stop
?’ She was shouting and, after a pause, she apologized. ‘Look, I know you’re trying to help, but you have to stop now. It’s over.’

The falling notes from his earphone told him she’d disconnected.

He stared at the screen of his mobile. ‘She’s not listening.’

Josh shrugged. ‘So we go around her.’

Fennimore shook his head. ‘I don’t see how. We’d need Marta’s username as well as the password to get onto her university account and, without a warrant, the university won’t give that away. But it’s only a matter of time before Tanford thinks of her university account and, when he does, it’s gone. We need to get to the evidence before he does. And even if we got her username from one of her friends and broke into her account, accessing the drive would compromise the evidence.’

‘Catch 22.’ Josh sounded distant, but the frown on his face said he was thinking hard.

Fennimore pushed his fingers through his hair and leaned back in his chair with his fingers interlaced at the crown. ‘If Kate is suspended, that’s it, she’s soiled goods. I don’t think her career will ever recover. She needs proof of Tanford’s guilt now, or at least something to present to the Chief Constable which proves she hasn’t totally lost the plot.’

‘Give me ten minutes.’ Josh eyed him critically. ‘You could, I dunno, shower?’

Fennimore became aware that he reeked. His shirt was still damp with sweat from the chase across town and the slow painful walk from Kate’s house, and his trousers were caked in mud and rock salt from the road. He hauled himself out of the chair and limped towards the bathroom.

When he came through to the sitting room ten minutes later, Josh was texting on his phone. Fennimore had dressed in a freshly laundered shirt and trousers, but he still felt dirty, as if Tanford’s corruption had drawn him in, made him part of the lies he’d woven about him.

‘So,’ Josh said, without looking up, ‘I texted one of the girls I was chatting up earlier.’ He was leaning forward in his chair and, when he did glance up, Fennimore saw another kingfisher flash of excitement in his eyes. ‘I told her Marta still isn’t answering her phone, and when I called to her flat, it’d been broken into. I say I think Marta should know – has she got an email address for her? She texts that she’s already tried that – everyone has.

‘
I
say, well, I don’t know about her, but I keep a few personal email accounts.’

Fennimore nodded; a lot of students preferred to use private email accounts – they were often faster, and less prone to outages than university networks. This had possibilities.

‘She’s just texted – she remembered there was this one time Marta sent her an email registered to a Gmail account.’ He grinned. ‘She’s found the address.’

Fennimore used his professional credentials shamelessly to gain access to Enderby’s secretary. The Chief Constable was in a meeting, she told him. Fennimore told her that he had information that was highly relevant to his meeting and persuaded her to tell Enderby that he was on the line. Enderby took the call in his secretary’s office. He listened sympathetically and gave instructions that Fennimore and Brown should be escorted to his office as soon as they arrived.

ACC Gifford rose from his chair as Fennimore came in. ‘Who let you in?’ he demanded.

‘I did, Stuart.’ The Chief Constable stepped around his desk and shook Fennimore’s hand.

Josh hung back a little; he seemed uneasy around so many uniforms – the Chief, Assistant Chief and Detective Superintendent were all in full regalia.

Kate turned to face them. The bruise on her forehead looked red and angry, a white lump at the centre of it seemed almost to throb visibly.

‘Nick,’ she said. ‘This isn’t helping.’

‘I’m prepared to hear him out,’ Mr Enderby said. ‘Chief Inspector?’

Simms gazed at Fennimore, despair and exhaustion on her face, but after a moment she gave a tired nod.

Spry, who hadn’t spoken, hunched lower in his chair, anticipating Gifford’s response, but Gifford was a man to respect the hierarchy, and he deferred to Enderby with a grudging ‘Very well.’

Simms closed her eyes briefly and turned to face Gifford again.

Fennimore should have felt guilty, using the Chief Constable to pull rank on her, but he didn’t. He told them what Kate couldn’t: that her daughter had been threatened with a gun and had narrowly escaped abduction, that she herself had been stalked and attacked and threatened. Throughout this, she bowed her head and stared at a spot on Gifford’s desk.

When Gifford began to splutter at the destruction of evidence, Enderby raised a single finger, and he subsided. Fennimore told them about Marta’s double life – as a sex worker and a brilliant student. He described her notebook, filled with details of drugs drops and contacts, registration numbers, sketches, the tip-offs to Crimestoppers, the man named ‘Rob’, who seemed to have such powerful connections, the photograph he and Kate Simms had found in the notebook which identified ‘Rob’ as Detective Superintendent Tanford. He finished with Marta’s call to Gary Parrish on the night she died.

Spry murmured a few muddled words.

Gifford seemed unmoved. ‘As I have explained to Chief Inspector Simms,’ he said, addressing the Chief Constable, ‘sadly, without firm evidence, I’ve really no reason to believe this isn’t all the product of a disturbed mind.’

‘Is that Chief Inspector Simms’s disturbed mind, or mine?’ Fennimore said.

Gifford raised his eyebrows and looked from Fennimore to Simms as if they were one and the same.

‘And DC Parrish – is he deluded and disturbed, too?’

Gifford spread his hands. ‘DC Parrish isn’t here to speak for himself,’ he said.

Fennimore held his gaze. ‘Only because he was killed in a hit and run a few hours ago.’

Gifford blinked. He must have been told of the young detective’s death, so perhaps he was offended by Fennimore’s bluntness. ‘Are you suggesting that his death was not an accident?’ he said.

‘Marta had documented evidence that a senior police officer has been associating with two major drugs suppliers, protecting them, taking bribes,’ Fennimore said. ‘She was a registered informant. And both she and her handler are now dead. What do
you
think, Stuart?’

‘Well,’ Spry said, nodding and shaking his head as if he didn’t know what to think. ‘That’s …’

But Gifford folded his arms and sat back in his chair. ‘I
believe
you’ve just told us that Chief Inspector Simms destroyed the evidence,’ he said.