Authors: Clare Donoghue
‘Peter?’ Lockyer asked.
‘Stop doing that,’ she said, frowning. ‘It freaks me out.’ She tried to maintain a cross expression, but couldn’t. It was unnerving when he read her mind like that, but part of her was relieved. It felt more like ‘old times’ between the two of them.
‘Oh, come on – you know I love doing it,’ he said. ‘Mind you, if you’d have asked me last week what you were thinking, I wouldn’t have had a clue. But this week,’ he said, hooking his thumbs under a pair of imaginary braces, ‘ta-dah, I can read you like a book, Jane.’
‘Good for you,’ she said, wishing she could say the same about him. He had changed in the past few days, regained some of his old self, but she still didn’t know what he was thinking. Not when it came to things that mattered. ‘What am I going to do about Lebowski?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think I’ve even got enough to keep him for the full forty-eight hours. That means he’ll be out by tonight. His lawyer’s been calling me all morning asking if I have any new evidence to support the arrest.’
‘Have you spoken to her?’
‘No, because I don’t have anything to tell her. She’s already provided an affidavit from his doctor saying he has no health issues or reason to be prescribed morphine, so that’s blown that one. Dave told me just now that he can’t say whether the pills were crushed up in food or taken orally in the normal manner. All he can say is that the fragments are consistent with digestion. We can’t prove they were crushed. Even if we could, I can’t prove Lebowski drugged her food, because her meal was eaten at least three days before her body was found. There’s no trace of the chilli con carne Lebowski claimed they ate. So unless Sasha turns up a chilli-mix laced with morphine in Lebowski’s kitchen, I’m up that infamous creek without a paddle.’
‘So let him go,’ Locker said.
She looked at him. ‘What? Just like that?’
‘What more can you do? As you say, unless the house search turns up something linking him to the morphine, or the blow to the back of Maggie’s head, your evidence won’t hold up.’
‘I know,’ she said, dropping down on the bonnet next to him. ‘Even the arrest has worked in his favour.’
‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.
‘Because it means the Exhibits team has nothing to do, again,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘Think about it. He was dating Maggie; saw her the night she died; admitted to sexual intercourse, to cooking her dinner, to arguing. That makes all the physical evidence on the body, and whatever we turn up at his house, worthless. Everything we find he’s told us about already. Now Elmstead: if the Exhibits team finds traces of soil on his shoes, in his car or on his sodding kitchen floor, we could place him at the scene of Maggie’s murder. Not any more,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He likes to go for walks in Elmstead Woods. Of course he has soil on his shoes.’ When Lockyer didn’t respond she opened her hands. ‘So where does that leave my investigation?’ She put the toe of her shoe into the gravel and swept it from side to side. The realization hit her as if someone had slapped her face.
‘That’s it,’ she said, slowing her breathing as the pieces fell into place. ‘He knew we were going to arrest him. That’s why he told me everything – everything that had happened between him and Maggie. He wanted me to know about Mort, about the fights. He wanted to put himself at the top of the suspect list. He knew the tox screen would tell us about the morphine and that it would be enough to arrest him. He also knew it was only a matter of time before the other body was found. So he took himself off to Elmstead, made a show of scrabbling around in the dirt, knowing that the neighbourhood would be on full alert after the discovery of Maggie’s body, knowing someone would call it in. It’s almost like he engineered this whole thing to prove just how clever he is.’
‘There is some good news,’ Lockyer said.
Jane almost choked on the laughter that wanted to come. ‘There is?’
‘Yes,’ he continued, pushing himself up off the car. ‘He might know how to skew your investigation, but he doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know how you think. We let him go and see what he does. It won’t end here. If he’s anything like the man you’re describing, then he won’t stop. Right now he has our attention, but in order to keep it – to really prove his superiority – he’ll have to do more, he’ll have to take risks.’ Jane took her phone out of her trouser pocket. ‘Who are you calling?’ he asked.
‘Phil Bathgate,’ she said, already dialling the number. ‘Lebowski might be clever, but no one knows the workings of a psycho’s mind better than Phil. And . . . ’ she said, holding the phone to her ear, ‘I’m starting to think Lebowski might not be alone in this. There are too many things, too many coincidences. You’ll probably think I’m stretching a point with this, but I still think Mort is involved. He knows more than he’s told us. I think it’s possible that he and Lebowski know each other. They both seem to relish their own brilliance. They’d be the perfect team.’ She saw the doubt on Lockyer’s face. ‘It’s my case. Maggie is my responsibility. I’m not about to let Lebowski run the show. I need to show him that you don’t have to have a PhD to mess with people’s heads. I won’t let him make a fool out of me . . . again.’
1st May – Thursday
‘I’m happy to come to you,’ Jane said, looking at her watch. ‘About three-thirty?’ She listened as Phil rattled off all the important things he had to do, debating aloud whether he had time to squeeze her into his hectic, life-altering schedule. She took a deep breath and waited. The last time they had spoken she had wanted to physically injure him. Today appeared to be no different. How could someone so useful be so annoying? ‘Fine, four-fifteen works for me. Thank you, Phil,’ she said, not feeling any gratitude at all. She ended the call and dropped her mobile onto the desk. She looked at her watch. It was two-thirty. Another five hours and Lebowski would be out.
How could she have been so gullible? It felt as if everything had been tailored, from his phone call on Monday night to his arrest yesterday, and she had fallen for it. Her office phone started ringing. She picked it up as she scrolled through her emails, clicking on a new message from Penny. ‘DS Bennett,’ she stated, double-clicking on the document attached to Penny’s email.
‘Hello, darling. Am I disturbing you?’ her mother asked.
‘No, Mum. I was just about to call you,’ she said, her cheeks heating at the lie.
‘I just wondered if you might have time to pick Peter up from school this afternoon.’
Jane started to read the document. She looked at her watch again. ‘Well, I’ve got a meeting just after four, so I’d be a bit pushed to get there and back. Why?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I was going to take your father to . . . Never mind, I shouldn’t have called. Not to worry. I’ll do it. What time do you think you’ll be home?’
‘No, no,’ Jane said. ‘I can sort something out. It’s fine.’ She tried to disguise the sigh that accompanied her statement.
‘No, honestly, darling. I’m sorry I bothered you. What time did you say you’d be home?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll need to check.’ She stopped and stared at the name in front of her. ‘Sorry,’ she said, looking on her desk for Mark’s case file. ‘Listen, can I call you back in a second?’
‘Of course, of course. I’ll speak to you later.’
The line went dead before Jane could answer. She replaced the phone in its cradle, found the file she was looking for and opened it, scanning her notes before turning back to her computer. She had asked Penny to find out more about Lebowski’s lawyer. His choice of legal representation had been bothering Jane ever since Mrs Whitaker had waltzed into the station in her immaculate suit. That kind of representation didn’t come cheap and, according to the desk sergeant, Lebowski had Whitaker’s contact details with him, in his wallet. Jane now knew why. Whitaker was worth every penny. She must have pulled some hefty strings to get the details of Lebowski’s previous dealings with the police sealed. Jane pushed herself away from her desk. She needed to talk to Roger.
Jane stopped running, bent over and took in several deep breaths. She had been circling the block for the past half an hour, sprinting for thirty seconds and then jogging for a couple of minutes. She had passed the gates to the station several times, but she wasn’t ready to go back to the office.
After getting the necessary permissions from Roger, it had only taken her another ten minutes to find the sealed file and read over Lebowski’s previous encounters with Lewisham police. The run was meant to clear her head. She sat down on the wall outside the station and rolled her neck around her shoulders.
‘Hey.’
She looked up and saw Lockyer walking towards her. He sat down next to her.
‘Good run?’ he asked.
‘I hate running around here,’ she said still somewhat breathless. ‘All that effort and I wind up back where I started.’
‘I don’t know why you don’t go to the Soho gym up the road. At least you can watch the TV,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be filling your lungs with exhaust fumes and you wouldn’t end up smelling of . . . ’ He leaned across and sniffed. ‘Curry. You smell of curry.’
‘Oh, sod off.’ she said, shoving him away. ‘I bloody hate the gym. You know I hate the gym.’ She punched him in the arm, somewhat harder than she had intended.
‘Okay,’ he said, stretching out the final syllable, rubbing his arm. ‘Might I enquire what’s up with you?’
‘I’ve got more on Lebowski,’ she said, picking a piece of lint off her tracksuit trousers.
‘And that’s a bad thing because . . . ?’
‘It isn’t. It’s just . . . ’ She looked at her watch. Her meeting with Phil wasn’t for another twenty minutes.
‘It’s just what?’
‘Lebowski has a criminal lawyer because he’s been here before,’ she said, pointing at the double doors leading into the station. ‘Do you remember the Amelia Reynolds case?’
Lockyer’s brow creased. ‘The name rings a bell, but I can’t remember the specifics, no.’
‘Amelia Reynolds was a university student murdered by strangulation six years ago. She was twenty-one years old. Her body was found in an allotment shed in Deptford. She had been sexually assaulted. Her killer was never found. Guess where she went to university.’
‘Greenwich,’ Lockyer said, turning to face her.
‘That’s the one,’ she said, running her fingers through her hair.
‘Lebowski taught her?’
‘No. It’s not quite that straightforward. Amelia was studying law, but according to the case file, she had an ethics module that Lebowski sat in on. He had to teach as part of his PhD. His thesis dealt with psychology and ethics apparently, so he opted to assist on a couple of modules for the credit and as part of his research. Anyway he, along with a dozen other tutors, was interviewed in the normal course of the inquiry, but Lebowski was brought back in – more than once in fact.’
‘Why?’ Lockyer asked.
‘The DCI on the case thought Lebowski was involved.’
‘And was he?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘As far as the case file reads, Lebowski had a passing knowledge of the victim. He had no alibi, but no personal relationship, no motive, no physical evidence – nothing to link him to the girl’s murder. I’ve read through the interview transcripts, and Lebowski sounds the same. I mean, he sounds just as sincere and measured as he did when I first met him.’
‘Which makes you think he was lying?’ Lockyer asked.
‘Yes, it does. If Lebowski’s the kind of man I think he is, then I think it’s also possible that Maggie wasn’t his first victim.’
The sun came out from behind a bank of cloud, warming Jane’s face.
‘Why didn’t this come up when Lebowski was first arrested?’ he asked.
‘His involvement in the case was sealed.’
‘How?’
‘Whitaker – Lebowski’s lawyer. She was present at his second interview and all subsequent interviews.’
‘How many were there?’ Lockyer asked.
‘Five,’ Jane said, looking at him. ‘Whitaker made a case that the DCI was heavy-handed, harassing Lebowski without cause. Which, given the information, is fair enough. She got a judge to agree that it could be damaging to his career, if future employers did a CRB or DBS check and found that he had been questioned in a murder investigation.’
Lockyer stood up. ‘Come on, my arse is going to sleep. We can continue this in my office. Have you got the case file?’
‘Yes,’ she said getting up. They walked up to the double doors, into the foyer and over to the lifts. Her brain ached as she tried to push and pull the facts into some semblance of order. She felt chilled as the sweat dried on her skin.
‘I still don’t get how Whitaker managed to wangle a seal on the file, if Lebowski wasn’t charged?’ Lockyer said. ‘His name wouldn’t have come up on any checks, unless he was going for a government job or something that required extra vetting; and even then sealing the file feels like overkill to me.’
‘Me too,’ Jane said, pushing the call button for the lift. ‘But that’s what happened.’ She zipped up her running jacket.
‘Who was the DCI?’ Lockyer asked, walking into the lift as the doors opened.
Jane waited for the doors to close before she said, ‘Mark.’
‘You’re kidding me?’
‘I wish I was.’ The doors opened and they both stepped out. Jane put her hand on Lockyer’s arm. ‘Can I ask you a question?
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘Do you think Lebowski killed Maggie?’
He was nodding before she had finished speaking. ‘I do, yes. If you recall, it was me who had to convince you of that fact,’ he said, smiling.
‘I know,’ she said, unable to return his smile. ‘And you believe Lebowski could have engineered the whole thing: having dinner with Maggie the night she was taken, getting arrested in Elmstead?’
Lockyer looked at her as if she had lost her mind. ‘Er, yes, Jane. I told you that earlier,’ he said. ‘I’m yet to be convinced about Mort’s involvement, but from everything I’ve seen and heard so far, I think Lebowski’s been clever enough to cover his arse.’
Jane took a deep breath before she spoke. ‘Mark was convinced Lebowski was involved in the murder of Amelia Reynolds. He just couldn’t prove it. That’s three bodies, Mike. Lebowski is linked to all of them: Reynolds, Maggie and whoever Dave’s got down in the mortuary suite.’