Laura looked through the glass in the waiting-room door. Egan was behind her.
‘Is that him?’ she asked, nodding towards the lanky kid in the bad suit. He had someone with him. A taller man in a suit. Short hair, flashes of grey around the temples. ‘Jimmy King’s boy?’
Egan nodded. ‘That’d be my guess.’ He sounded terse, his plan to covertly observe Luke King thrown away by the unexpected visit. The boy was either playing a dangerous game, or he was innocent. Egan pointed through the glass. ‘And he’s brought his lawyer. Sam Nixon’s not here to carry his sandwiches.’
‘Is Nixon any good?’
Egan smiled. ‘None of them is good. They’re just different shades of shifty.’
Laura looked back through the glass. She knew that most police officers didn’t like lawyers, but she knew something else as well: that when they got into trouble themselves, drink driving or with expenses fiddles, they always went to the trickiest defence lawyers in town.
As Laura looked through the glass, she put Eric Randle
to the back of her mind. He had once been arrested for murder, but not convicted. And the scene in the waiting room now made the whole picture look rather different.
‘Maybe it’s not all bad,’ said Laura. ‘After all, not many witnesses come to see the police with a brief. But why come at all? And how did he know?’
Egan’s lips twitched at that. ‘I don’t know, but if there’s a leak, I’ll find it.’
Laura went to press the button to release the security lock, but stopped when she felt Egan’s hand over hers.
‘Let’s make him sweat for a while first,’ he said. He left his hand there.
Laura pulled her hand away, and she saw that Egan was smiling. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Saved by the bell. As she brought it out, she saw it was a message from Jack.
‘Is Luke King there anything to do with you?’
She shook her head and sighed. He didn’t miss a trick.
Sam felt edgy as he waited in the police station. He sat on an old orange seat, hard plastic bolted to a hard tiled floor, and he shifted about as he tried to get comfortable. A bored desk assistant trapped behind glass took details of driving documents as people brought them in. Sam watched her, just to avoid Luke’s conversation. He had been told too much already.
Sam knew he had to get Luke out of the police station, but Luke didn’t seem interested in that. He hadn’t said anything since the confession. Instead, Luke sat silently, the tapping of his foot on the floor the only noise. It sounded nervous, but whenever Sam looked across, the boy looked calm, almost happy.
Sam had told him only one thing: say nothing.
Sam turned around sharply when he heard the door open. It was DI Egan. He looked as he always did, quietly confident. There was an officer behind him he hadn’t met before. A woman, tall, attractive, with shoulder-length dark hair and dimples. Sam hoped that she might discourage Egan from playing games.
Egan strode towards Luke, businesslike, trying to cut Sam out. Sam stepped in front of him.
‘Good morning, Mr Egan.’ Sam drew himself up to his full six feet so that he looked down on Egan. He sensed the other cop standing back.
‘Mr Nixon, it is so good of your client to come down and help us.’ Egan said it with his top lip curled, as if Sam had just pissed on his shoes. ‘We need to eliminate him from an inquiry.’
Sam sensed the unspoken words: Why does he need a lawyer if he’s innocent?
‘Which inquiry?’
‘That doesn’t involve you at this stage. Mr King isn’t under arrest.’
Sam turned round to look at Luke, just to gauge his mood. Luke’s eyes betrayed no emotion. They were cold, precise.
‘If you want to leave, you can,’ Sam said to him. It was a cue, but Sam wasn’t sure that Luke understood it:
leave now, while you still have the chance.
‘You do know why your client is here, don’t you?’ said Egan from behind Sam, sounding hostile.
Sam turned back around. ‘You tell me all about it.’
Egan sighed, already tired of the game. ‘We would
have come for him anyway. We think young Mr King might have some information in relation to a murder investigation. We were hoping he would help us, so we can eliminate him from our inquiry.’
Sam leaned into Egan, as if to whisper. Egan leaned in too, couldn’t stop himself. Sam spoke quietly, almost a hiss, his eyes wide in mock-excitement. ‘Did you say a
murder
?’
Sam saw the female officer’s mouth flick upwards in a smile, but she stopped herself when Egan stepped back, his anger flushing its way up his cheeks.
‘Don’t try to be funny, Mr Nixon.’
‘There is nothing funny about being linked with a murder,’ said Sam. ‘Unless you can assure me that my client is not under suspicion, he does not want to speak to you.’
Egan breathed through his nose, his lips twitching, saying nothing. Laura intervened.
‘We’ve received information that your client was nearby,’ she said, and she flashed a quick smile at Luke, disarming, friendly. ‘He might have seen something that could help us. He could be a vital witness.’
Smart answer, thought Sam. Egan looked angry, like he had lost some ground.
‘Hello,’ said Sam to Laura. ‘Have we met?’ He asked because he knew it would annoy Egan.
Laura was trying to look stern as they exchanged details. Sam caught an accent, south of England.
‘I’ve spoken with my client and he has nothing to say.’
‘Except when it comes out of your mouth,’ said Egan, looking at Luke. ‘So why is he here, in his best suit?’
‘Because if he hadn’t come, you would have hauled him out of bed in his pyjamas, probably with a photographer on your tail, just to get your perma-tan on TV.’
Laura looked down, smirking.
‘Look, Inspector,’ Sam continued, trying to sound reasonable, ‘Mr King has nothing he wants to say to you. If you want to make him, you have to depose him at court. But for that you need to charge someone else, so if you want to hear what he has to say, either arrest him or someone else.’
Sam turned around and took hold of Luke’s arm to escort him out of the station. He tried to move quickly, but Egan was quicker, moving fast, gripping Luke’s other arm.
‘Luke King, I am arresting you for murder.’
Sam was shocked. He could tell from the look in Laura McGanity’s eyes that she was too. That was good. It meant that Egan had acted off the cuff. It meant that there wasn’t any evidence against King yet. The custody clock would tick away, and it would put pressure on the police. This was a high-profile arrest, and Dermot Egan had made it without any evidence.
If they had done nothing, Egan could have watched Luke at leisure, covertly. Now he had shown his hand, moved too quickly.
Luke looked the calmest of all of them, almost serene.
Sam stood to one side as Egan cautioned Luke, giving him the usual ‘right to remain silent’ bull. You can say nothing, but if you do, the prosecution will use it against you. Didn’t seem like much of a right to Sam.
As Luke was led away, Sam looked down at his hands. Killer’s hands. Then he looked at Luke’s face.
Luke was smiling.
I moved away from the door of the police station. Laura had kept her back to me, but I could tell that Luke King had been arrested.
And I knew that Laura was dealing with the murder investigation. I smiled to myself. Now that Jimmy King’s son had been arrested, the story had just got better.
As I walked back towards the court, I saw Terry McKay again. He was sitting on the court steps, receiving a green bottle from one of the others swaying near him. He barely looked up as I stood over him.
‘Where does King live?’ I asked.
His eyes focused on me slowly. He shut one eye as if the sun had blinded him, but it was almost certainly the sherry that had made his pupils sluggish.
‘Who wants to know?’
I grinned at him. ‘I do.’
He looked me up and down, and then laughed to himself. His friends stepped back and looked at me strangely, as if I was from another world. And I suppose I was in a way. They lived their lives in a haze as they stumbled from one bottle to the next, never really taking part in society. They regarded me as an intruder, a reminder of the life they had stopped living when the drink took full hold.
He waved me away and lifted the bottle to his mouth.
I thought our dialogue had ended, and I had turned
to walk away, when he slurred at me, ‘Some big fucking house past Whitwell. On the road to fucking nowhere.’
I reached into my pocket and floated a twenty down. I had a sense that we might speak again, so it seemed like dialogue in the bank.
‘Get drunk on some decent stuff,’ I said. ‘No more of that shit.’
Terry didn’t look at me. Neither did any of his friends. They were looking at the note, and it was as if all they could see was their next bottle floating towards the pavement.
‘How did Egan handle the interview?’
Laura turned to look at Pete. It was the first thing he had said since they’d left the station.
They were heading out to Luke King’s house, where he lived with his parents in a palatial new-build many miles from Blackley They were heading north and were driving along single-track country lanes, over pack-horse bridges, twisting between long hedgerows, the fields dotted by trees and painted in that brighter green which seemed so much more like summer, broken only by the white dots of sheep.
‘Egan was like I expected,’ said Laura.
Pete laughed. ‘Like an arsehole then.’
Laura looked out of the window and smiled. ‘Your words, not mine.’
‘Any hissy fits from the defence?’
Laura thought back to the interview. It had been like a long fight, starting from when Egan tried to get the defence lawyer to sit in a corner, well away from his client. From then on the defence hadn’t co-operated. It was a tricky balance, Laura knew that, the need to throw
the defence off-kilter, to try and get a confession, but without turning it into bullying. If it went too far, the confession could be kept away from the jury. Murderers had walked free because of that.
‘One or two,’ she said. ‘Maybe when Egan gets one of his confessions thrown out of court, he’ll do things differently.’
Laura turned to look out of the side window. She had taken a gamble in coming up to the King house. The interview with Luke King had ended when a superintendent interrupted and asked to discuss tactics with Egan. Laura had guessed from Egan’s face that someone with influence had placed a call, that the tactics were more about getting King out than keeping him in.
For all the things about Egan she didn’t like, Laura thought he was right to be suspicious about Luke King. And arresting him would get DNA samples from him, from his hair, his fingernails. Anything else was best to look for while he was still locked up. This was a murder investigation, and Jess Goldie deserved more than favours called in from the golf-club bar. Maybe the inside of the car had blood smeared on the steering wheel or on the seat, or his clothes contained traces of her blood or hair.
Laura had needed Egan’s consent to search the house, and he was the only inspector she was prepared to ask. He had nodded quickly, hoping that she would find something to justify his decision to make the arrest. Laura had been ready to go on her own, but she sensed that it would be a no-loser for Pete: he would either play a part in Egan’s downfall or he would find something useful. Either way, he would get to raise a glass.
‘How was Egan with you?’ Pete asked, back to his favourite subject.
‘Familiar,’ she said, but she sensed that Pete guessed it anyway.
‘That’d be about right,’ he replied, still staring straight ahead. ‘He tries it on with everyone, especially new meat like you.’
‘You know how to make a girl feel special,’ she said jokingly, but Pete didn’t laugh.
Laura watched him for a while as he just stared straight ahead. ‘What’s the thing between you two?’ she asked.
Pete didn’t react at first, and Laura started to wonder whether he had heard her, but then he sighed and replied, ‘We started as cops at the same time. I ended up on the Support Unit before he did, so by the time he arrived I’d learned a few tricks of the trade.’
Laura raised her eyebrows at that. She knew about the Support Unit. In jumpsuits and boots, they patrolled Saturday nights, looking to split up fights. Or maybe prolong them. The ‘distraction strike’ was their favourite technique, where an officer under threat could strike the attacker hard, the distraction of the pain making time for an arrest. Best delivered as a hard punch to the nose, it suited those who liked a ruck. As Laura looked at Pete, she guessed that he had fitted in well in the Support Unit.
‘Did you have the van door rule?’ she asked.
He tilted his head, and then started to smile. ‘So they had it in London too?’
Laura looked forward again. ‘I’ve heard of it.’ And she had seen it in action, the rule that if the back doors of the van had to open, the cops didn’t leave the scene
until someone was in the van with them, for the handcuffed ride back to the station with plenty of hard braking. The spread of CCTV had stopped much of the fun for the Support Unit, but until they put cameras in the vans, most people would still arrive at the station on the van floor, the victim of one too many emergency stops.
‘What did Egan do that upset you so much?’
‘He didn’t like our methods, so he reported them, and then backed a prisoner up on a complaint.’ Pete glanced at Laura. ‘Maybe he was right, I don’t know, but why didn’t he tell us first?’
‘What happened to you?’
‘I got shoved into Custody for a couple of years. It was only the arrival of civilian jailers that got me out, and by the time I did he had arse-kissed all the way to his pips.’
‘So he’s not the most popular person in the station?’
Pete shook his head. ‘Not below him. Those above him like him, admire him for his courage, all that shit. And let’s face it, he’s only looking up.’
Laura shook her head and looked out of the window. She felt her phone vibrate again. ‘
Meet for lunch? J xx
’
Laura sighed. It sounded like a great idea, but she knew it was a no.
She texted back.
‘No can do. Off for drive in country. Make sure Bobby ok from school’
She put her phone back in her pocket and thought about the long nights in she’d shared with Jack in London just a few weeks earlier. As she looked at the countryside flashing by, they seemed like part of a different life.
* * *
I smiled when I got the message. I had expected the police to head out to the house. It was a common formula: have an interview to set up the lies, and then search the house to disprove them.
I had parked half a mile from the house. I’d asked at a local garage for the exact location of Jimmy King’s house, showed them my press badge and said I was late for an interview. I was still driving my 1973 Triumph Stag, in Calypso Red. It had been my father’s old car, washed and treasured by him every Sunday until his death. I loved the car myself now, it reminded me of sunny weekends watching Dad polish it, but I knew that Laura would recognise it in a flash if I parked it too close to the house.
I was sitting in a tree, fifty yards from the house and across a secluded lane. I was looking down into the garden, a long green lawn, striped, with colourful borders all around. Pink, blues, violets. They looked well-maintained, and at the end of the garden were trees, willow and pine, although they were still small, some years to go before they created the country-garden look they were trying to achieve. The house itself stood out against the old stone cottages dotted around the valley. The bricks were fresh and new, with white pillars against the church-style front door and two large gables at the front, so that the house was H-shaped, grand and imposing. I guessed that the grilles on the gate were so people could see in, rather than the Kings see out.
All I had to do now was wait.