Authors: A. Garrett D.
‘The camera was hidden in the dresser mirror,’ the tech explained. ‘Every room was rigged up for video and audio – we found racks of monitors in the back office – but this is the only drive we’ve found.’
Marta checked her lipstick, then, in an apparently careless action, she tossed the towel over the dresser mirror. The screen went dark.
‘Wait a second,’ the tech said. The picture returned, but from a different angle this time.
‘There was another camera,’ the tech explained. ‘We found it in the clock over the door. The film has been edited together from the two bits of footage.’
Marta had placed a briefcase on the bed and was peeking inside. She lifted out a police evidence bag, and then another, and a third. The tamper-proof seals had been broken and they were empty, but it was just possible to see signatures and numbers inked on the white labelling bands.
‘With a bit of tweaking, we might be able to give you the evidence reference numbers off the bags,’ the tech said.
Marta dived back into the briefcase and took out a couple of hefty wads of ten and twenty pound notes. She stared towards the angle of the room, where Tanford had disappeared. For a second it looked like she might run. But instead, she laid the money and the labels out carefully inside the briefcase, took her phone from her bag and clicked off a few photographs. Her thumbs flickered over the keypad.
Moran said, ‘The text she sent to Gary Parrish?’
‘Probably, but let’s hope she sent the photos to one of her email accounts as well,’ Fennimore said.
The tech nodded. ‘We’ll look for anything she sent on the night of the murder.’
Marta began to rearrange the bags and money back in the briefcase.
A dull
thunk
, then the rush of water sounded louder. Marta flinched wildly.
‘Thought you might want to join me.’ Tanford’s voice came from somewhere off-camera.
Marta smiled, and let the kimono slip, exposing her shoulder. She quirked one eyebrow ironically.
‘Such treasures, darling,’ she said, putting a Russian roll into her words.
A blur of motion, then Tanford was in shot. He threw Marta face down on the bed and straddled her, seizing both her wrists in one hand, reached into the open briefcase. A second later he stood back. She was cuffed.
‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I fucking
knew
we had a rat in the kitchen.’
The camera caught everything. The whipping, the rapes; he choked her with a leather weightlifting belt. She told him nothing. In fact, he revealed more in his interrogation of her than they would ever have got from him in an interview. His questions were an admission to everything – the drugs recycling, the women he’d tortured before. The third time he choked her, she remained limp and still for a long time.
He muttered, ‘Fuck,’ and turned her over.
Marta lunged at him, butting him in the stomach. She sank her teeth into the flesh of his abdomen and he howled. She fought and bit and kicked but she was still handcuffed and he was twice her weight; he got free of her, stumbling back from the bed, and fell hard on his backside. He grabbed the nearest thing to hand – his shoe – and hit her hard in the face as she came at him again. Bone crunched; she fell to her knees and he hit her again, screaming, out of control. And once he’d started he didn’t seem able to stop.
The camera recorded his panicked phone call to the Henrys; Tanford, trembling and still naked, on the edge of the bed, Marta choking and convulsing behind him.
50
‘To take revenge half-heartedly is to court disaster; either condemn or crown your hatred.’
P
IERRE
C
ORNEILLE
They always keep the shoes.
And Tanford had kept his. They were steeped in Marta’s blood, although you wouldn’t have known it from the healthy gleam of polish on the leather. But the seams and the small creases, the lace eyelets, all held their imprint, all told their story.
Kate Simms asked him if he would like to explain how the blood got onto his shoes.
‘You know what you remind me of?’ he said.
‘Could you answer the question, please?’
‘You’ll see these little birds on the beaches up in the north-east; they turn over stones looking for food. Run and turn, run and turn, run and turn, like little clockwork toys, looking under every stone.’
‘Marta Aizupiete’s blood on your shoes,’ she said evenly. ‘The left shoe, in particular, is heavily stained.’
She might not have spoken. ‘They don’t know why they do it – half the time they don’t even find anything – it’s just their nature. Run and turn.’ He stared at her, a thoughtful look on his face. ‘That’s you, Kate – a wind-up toy, not even understanding why you do—’ he spread his hands ‘—what you do.’
Simms showed him a short section of the recording. He bunched his right hand into a fist and cupped it in his left and the muscles of his face too were bunched like a closed fist. He called the Henrys vicious untrustworthy slime, his breath stuttering and growling. His eyes glittered and a blood vessel pulsed in his temple as he told Kate she should just have done her sums and written up her report and left him the hell alone.
But after half a minute, something strange happened. It was eerie to watch: the angry pulse in his temple stilled and the muscles of his face relaxed. He rested his chin on his closed fists, his breathing slowed and his gaze fixed with avid attention on the screen. With a wave of nausea, Simms realized he was totally absorbed in watching himself beat Marta Aizupiete to death.
He admitted that there was money in the briefcase, and police evidence bags, which he had insisted the brothers hand back to him – he didn’t want the possibility of them using it to blackmail him in the future. He claimed that Marta was still breathing when he left her, that the brothers must have finished the job.
He changed his story when a new section of video came to light. In this fragment, a short time had passed, and Tanford was showered and dressed.
Frank Henry entered the room. Tanford stood nervously at the end of the bed, watching Frank’s reaction.
Frank looked at Marta’s ruined body and said quietly, ‘What the fuck?’
Tanford began to explain, but Frank cut him short. ‘Is she dead?’
Tanford’s face relaxed and all signs of nervousness left him. ‘Oh, I made sure of it,’ he said.
Epilogue
Four victims were eventually identified from blood spatter in the factory undercroft – Tanya, the surviving kidnap/assault victim, and three others. One was the victim they found buried – she had been whipped, but they’ve found no trace of Tanford on the body, or the wrappings he’d used on her – the other two were not on the DNA database. Tanya had vanished as soon as news of the Hull murder broke. They had a close physical match to Tanford’s riding crop from the walls of the basement in Hull, but close was not enough, and Candice’s body was cleaner in death than it had ever been in the last months of her life. No semen, no fibres, no microscopic traces.
In late autumn, Detective Superintendent Tanford was tried and convicted of Marta’s murder and the conspiracy and drugs offences. In truth, Greater Manchester, Humberside and Northumbria Police had been jointly horrified at the prospect of prosecuting a senior, decorated police officer with serial murder, but when the press release went out, they did allow Kate Simms to say that they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the murder of Candice Watson. Tanford was recommended to serve a minimum of twenty-five years.
Sol and Frank Henry were given life sentences and sent to Manchester Strangeways and HMP Preston, respectively, for drugs trafficking. Fourteen months had been added to their tariffs for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
Detective Sergeant Renwick was convicted on charges of being concerned in the distribution of controlled drugs and theft in respect of the recycled drugs, breaking and entering and theft from Marta’s flat, and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
George Howard was released, cleared of all charges. His Easter Chocolate Indulgence Weekend was an unqualified triumph.
Fennimore paced his office. Spring and summer had passed, the new undergraduate intake had arrived and was bedded in, and he was already groaning in irritation at the poor standard of literacy of their mid-term assignments. He hadn’t seen Kate Simms since Tanford’s trial. They had kept in phone and email contact, but today she asked for a Skype call – said she needed to see him face to face. It was 3.15 in the afternoon; it had rained heavily all day and the streets at the crossroads below his office window were wet, but the clouds parted suddenly, and the winter sun broke through like a smile, turning each micro-puddle on the tarmac roadway into a tiny prism, refracting light in shimmering rainbows of colour. The traffic threw up spumes that caught the light and turned the grey streets below him into a carnival.
Or perhaps it was only his mood that made him see the Granite City with such a romantic eye.
It was nearly ten months since Kate Simms had first contacted him, and since then he had anticipated every phone call – every text and email – with keen pleasure.
His Skype alert sounded and he clicked the ‘answer’ key without delay. Simms was peering into the webcam as if she felt that she would be able to see clear from Manchester to the shivering Aberdonian streets if only she looked hard enough. Fennimore smiled and waved to her and she moved closer to the camera, her face blurring in and out of focus, but she didn’t return his smile.
‘You look tense,’ he said. ‘This can’t be good.’
‘Sol and Frank Henry,’ she said. ‘They’ve been murdered in prison; both shanked. Timed to happen within minutes of each other. Their sauna was torched a couple of hours later.’
He nodded. ‘It wasn’t likely that a couple of scallies from North Manchester would be the top-feeders in this particular food chain,’ he said. ‘They’ve been made an example for the rest to heed.’
Simms agreed and they were silent for a few moments, each thinking back over the turbulent weeks of the investigation, and the dangers they had encountered.
‘And …’ She blushed. ‘I’m being given a commendation.’
He grinned. ‘About bloody time.’
‘It should be yours,’ she said.
‘Nonsense. I only took the job on in the first place because I owed you a huge favour.’
She looked into the camera and smiled softly. ‘Well, the debt is repaid, tenfold,’ she said.
‘Nuh-uh. I don’t accept that,’ he said, not thinking to cover the alarm he felt. ‘I consider the debt only partially discharged and I reserve the right to do you the huge favour of meddling in your investigations whenever the mood takes me.’
He saw a slight wince. ‘About that,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to know – I’ll be heading off to the US after Christmas.’
He experienced a sick thud. ‘For good?’
‘A few months maybe. The Chief Constable thought it might help – let the dust settle. Tanford had a lot of friends on the force, and some of them are finding it hard to accept his guilt.’
‘What part of the US?’
Fool
, he thought,
blurting it out like that
. But he did need to know. Foolishly or not, he felt that in some way being able to picture a location would make the distance seem less excruciating.
‘St Louis,’ she said. ‘It’s a method exchange – you know, swapping skills and ideas.’
‘Sounds good,’ he said, trying to sound like he meant it. ‘Is the family going with you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Kieran started a new job in September. It’s a good school – he likes it – he’s happy there.’ He heard the overassertiveness in her tone, and perhaps she did, too, because she stopped. ‘Anyway, my mother has agreed to come up from London to help with Tim and Becky, just while I’m away.’
There were things he wanted to say, but he knew she didn’t want to hear them. He had complicated her life too much already. So Fennimore wished her well, and repeated his offer of help, and she thanked him, though both of them knew she wouldn’t ever ask for it.
And as the early darkness of an Aberdonian winter closed around him, he opened a laptop that he had bought recently. Every file on the hard drive had been electronically fragmented and was unreadable. It was an exact copy of Tanford’s hard drive, wangled from a computer tech who told him any data was irretrievable. It could take years to find anything usable, never mind useful. But Tanford had said he had contacts, and although Tanford was a liar, Fennimore knew that this one thing, said to wound, was true.
Suzie was still out there – he knew it. And with Tanford’s contacts, he might inch slowly closer to her, even if it did take years. Because the one thing Fennimore had plenty of was time.
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