Authors: Chris Ewan
Angela wiped her hands on a dishcloth and parted the curtain to check on their visitor. When she finally allowed the man into the back room, she made it clear that she’d be waiting just outside the door with the phone close at hand.
He was older than Lena had expected. Mid-forties, with a short, muscular frame. He was wearing an army surplus overcoat, green cargo pants and desert boots. There was a ring in his nose and a collection of piercings in his ear.
He said, ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police.’
Lena gave him a bunch of reasons. She told him she’d hadn’t killed Alex. She told him she had some idea of the people who’d been involved in his death, and that she’d just escaped from them. She explained how, with his help, she might be able to prove her innocence, if only they could get in touch with a plumber based on the Isle of Man. Then she told him what Alex had said. How Alex had made her promise to contact him if ever she was in trouble. How Alex had assured her that he was someone she could rely on.
The man toyed with one of his earrings as he turned over what he’d been told. Then he took a deep, contemplative breath, shook his head and emptied his lungs with a sigh.
‘So come on outside and get in my jeep,’ he told her. ‘There’s a group of people you really ought to meet.’
Lena hesitated. She bit hard on her lip and fixed him with a level stare. ‘I want to make these people pay,’ she said. ‘For what they’ve done to me and the people who tried to help me. But most of all, for Alex.’
‘I hear you,’ the man said. ‘Trust me, making people pay is what we’re all about.’
*
We agreed to call Shimmin. Dad asked him to come round right away. He didn’t explain why, just that it was urgent. Shimmin was reluctant – he was heading up the investigation into Jackie Teare’s death – but when Dad pressed, he relented.
While we waited for his arrival, I went into my bathroom and tended to the cut to my head. I ran water into the sink, wet a few wads of toilet paper and cleaned the laceration as best I could. Then I soaped my hand and washed the blood from my face. The water turned pink against the white porcelain. My sling was a mess. It was speckled with red blotches. My shoulder was aching and immobile‚ and I was stiff and sore all over. I felt a hundred years old. I pulled the plug and stared hard at myself in the mirror, trying to come to terms with some of the things Dad had told me about Laura. It wasn’t easy. I knew there’d been more distance between us in recent years, and that we hadn’t shared as much as we used to when we were growing up, but it was tough to accept that she hadn’t come to me for help sooner, while she was still alive.
If she could have been with us now, I guessed she might have said that she’d been trying to limit the risks she was exposing her loved ones to. That confiding in Dad was already a step too far. But I didn’t know if I could believe it.
I grabbed a towel. Dried my face. Pressed the fabric against the gash in my skull, then tossed the towel into the bath.
I felt like I’d let Laura down. I felt that way because, in my heart, I knew that I had. My sister had been in fear for her life and I hadn’t noticed. The way I’d seen it, she’d made a choice. Gone to London. Put her career ahead of all of us. Only now did I understand that she’d done it for our own protection. And the hardest part of all was that I’d never have a chance to tell her so.
My one consolation was that she’d told Lena to trust me, and that she’d left the code on the memory stick for me to decipher. I guessed she’d been sharing out the dangers between me and Dad. She’d believed that I’d come through for her when it mattered, and now I was asking myself how exactly I was supposed to do that.
I had the memory stick. I had the video file it contained. But I didn’t know what to do with it. Would Laura want the footage made public? Or had she resisted that move when she was alive for a reason? Did her appearance on the video point to her involvement in the murder of Alex Tyler, or did it absolve her? I couldn’t tell for certain either way. I had no idea what to do.
DI Shimmin arrived before I’d reached a conclusion. I stepped out of the bathroom and found that Dad had met him at my front door. They were speaking in hushed tones. I didn’t hear what was said, but I stood at the top of the stairs and watched Shimmin shoot glances my way. His expression grew darker and more sullen. His swollen eyes closed almost to slits, becoming ever more guarded.
He didn’t talk to me until he’d knelt down and looked over the body. He did it brusquely, rolling the man’s head to one side with the end of a biro. He grunted, then pointed the biro at the pistol.
‘This the gun he was killed with?’ he asked.
I shook my head. Told him the gun that had done the shooting was on my coffee table. Rebecca had dropped the magazine out and made the pistol safe before accompanying Grandpa back to his room.
Shimmin left the gun alone and went through the man’s pockets. He came up with the ID the man had shown me back at the sports centre. A wallet. A mobile phone. A set of car keys. It was an easy guess that the keys fitted the Vauxhall I’d seen parked outside.
Shimmin opened the leather ID folder and scanned its contents. He looked up at me and Dad from his crouched position beside the dead man, then held the ID out to Dad.
Dad flipped it open and considered it in silence. I shuffled closer and took a look for myself. There was an imposing government crest. A portrait photograph of the dead man. And a name. John Anthony Menser.
‘Name means nothing to me,’ Dad said.
Shimmin hitched an eyebrow at me.
‘No,’ I told him.
Dad closed the ID and passed it back to Shimmin. He slapped it against his knee, deep in thought.
‘Could anyone have heard the shots?’
His question surprised me. It took a moment for me to gather my thoughts. ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘We’re a fair distance from the care home. A lot of the residents are hard of hearing, and at this time of day, most of them would be in the television room. They have the sound up pretty loud.’
‘What about staff?’
‘It’s possible. They might have heard from the kitchen.’
‘Neighbours?’
‘Maybe. Why?’
His eyes drifted to the dining chair in the middle of the room. The one Dad had been made to sit on. He straightened and took in the memory stick on the kitchen counter and the pay-as-you-go mobile on the floor.
‘Sit down,’ he said, and directed me to the sofa. ‘You’re going to run through
exactly
what’s been going on.’
This time, I told him everything I could think of. Every detail I could remember. There was nothing I kept back. Nothing I held on to. I’d had enough of trying to deal with this on my own. Enough of the raw data that had been swirling endlessly around my head.
Shimmin didn’t speak until I’d finished talking. Twenty minutes. Maybe more. He was sitting on the coffee table in front of me, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together below his engorged chin. The items he’d taken from the dead man’s pockets were arranged on the table beside him, next to the Beretta.
He cleared his throat. ‘Jimmy,’ he said, without looking at my dad. ‘Why don’t you go over and check on your father-in-law? I need to have a conversation with young Rob here. Alone.’
Chapter Fifty-six
Shimmin waited until he was sure that Dad had left. Then he inclined his head towards the lifeless figure on my kitchen floor.
‘Your man here, you say he’s in this video footage?’
I nodded.
‘And the paramedic guy? The one we found at Teare’s place?’
‘It’s definitely him.’
‘And the two of them killed this eco guy and set it up as a frame job?’
‘That’s how it looked.’
‘Show me.’
I did. I went downstairs to my van and fetched my laptop and then I called up the MPEG file. I didn’t need to plug in the memory stick to access the video. Rebecca had copied the file to my laptop before we drove back to the care home. We’d lied about not making a duplicate.
Shimmin balanced the computer on his lap and viewed the video in silence. I watched from over his shoulder. When he was finished, he closed the laptop and set it down on the coffee table alongside the Beretta.
‘Something to tell you,’ he said, in a grudging rumble. ‘Something I never told your dad.’
He looked up at me, and there was a pleading in his deep-set eyes. A moistness about his pupils.
He went to say something more, then changed his mind and found his feet. He brushed past me and walked around the far side of the kitchen island to the sink. He ran the tap. Lowered his head. Cupped water to his mouth.
‘It’s about Laura, isn’t it?’
He turned the tap off and rubbed the last of the water around his face.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
I didn’t move.
‘Just do me a favour and sit down and listen. You can ask your questions when I’m finished. But first, let me tell you the way it happened. Let me get through this, OK?’
The pleading was still there in his eyes. And there was a brittleness in his voice. He rested his arms against the kitchen counter, elbows locked, like he was bracing for an impact.
I felt myself doing as he asked. I lowered myself on to the dining chair Dad had been made to sit on.
‘Your dad said he told you about your sister. The plan she’d come up with. The way I found her at Marine Drive.’
I nodded.
‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that.’
I snatched a breath. Went to speak. Shimmin raised a hand.
‘She was dead, all right. No question. But she wasn’t alone.’ He tilted his bloated head towards the dead man on the floor. ‘This guy was with her. So was the guy I found at Teare’s place. Your paramedic with the beard.’ He tapped at the area of skin below his bottom lip, as if confirming who he was talking about.
The room shrunk around us. I felt the walls pressing in. I shook my head. Unable to talk. Unsure what to say.
‘It was just getting light. Sun coming up. I saw where Laura’s car had gone through the fence. Saw that she’d done what she’d threatened to do. So I pulled over and I sat there for a few seconds trying to decide what my next move should be. I didn’t have a choice. I knew that by then. I couldn’t just leave her down there. So I got out and I walked to the edge, ready to clamber down to her. And that was when I saw them.’
The room contracted again. It felt like a dark bubble, closing around us.
‘They had the driver’s door open. Your man here was leaning inside. The guy with the beard was looking over his shoulder. I thought they must have seen her car. I thought they were trying to help.’
He glanced down at his clenched fists, pressing into the granite counter. I felt my eyes go wide. As if I was looking over that cliff edge myself. As if I was standing there beside him, surveying the scene.
‘I nearly turned around then. They hadn’t seen me. The noise of the wind and the waves must have masked the sound of my car pulling up. But I went down to them. I got halfway before the guy with the beard realised I was coming. And that was when I knew something was wrong. Because he didn’t shout at me. He didn’t wave his arms and ask me to call an ambulance. He just tapped his pal on the shoulder and both of them gave me a look like they didn’t want me coming any closer.’
I was shaking my head. Couldn’t stop.
‘I got out my ID and told them I was police. Made them step aside.’ Shimmin rocked his head backwards on his shoulders. Drew a sharp breath as he raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘She was a mess, lad. Awful. There was a lot of blood. Bruising. I hadn’t expected it. She’d told me she was going to push the car over, then walk down to it and get inside. She was going to drug herself. Her injuries wouldn’t be on the outside, but that was OK. A lot of car accidents, people die from internal stuff. Force of gravity inside your body. She reckoned being unconscious would be enough to fool anyone who wasn’t in on the scheme. But there was no way that had happened. It was obvious to me she’d been in the car when it went over the cliff. And she hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt.’
Shimmin lowered his face, but his eyes were unfocused. Like he was looking through me, back to the memory he’d been shying away from.
I had a sudden urge to bolt from my chair. To lash out at him with everything I had.
‘I checked for a pulse. Nothing there. Then I asked the two men what had happened. The guy on your floor took the lead. He said they’d found your sister like that. That they’d been trying to resuscitate her.’
‘But you didn’t believe him?’
‘Why was she still in the car? They should have laid her flat on the ground. And mouth-to-mouth? Chest compressions? They take a lot of effort. Lot of energy. But these guys weren’t even breathing hard. They didn’t have any blood on them. And the first thing you do with CPR is you loosen the victim’s clothing, clear their airways. They hadn’t done that. Your sister had a coat on. It was still zipped. And her mouth was closed.’
I could feel a rage bubbling up inside me. Boiling over.
Shimmin shook his head roughly, like he was trying to rearrange his thoughts. ‘I didn’t like it. I knew the kind of people your sister had been afraid of. And these two guys were too calm. No way were they there by accident. But the thing that was bothering me most was what the guy had been doing inside her car. If he hadn’t been trying to help your sister, he must have been doing something else. Then I looked at her face again. Really looked at it.’ His voice began to trail away. ‘Her nose and mouth were blue. And there were red marks on her skin. They were starting to fade, but they looked like fingermarks.’
I felt the fight go out of me then. Felt it drain clean away, leaving me suddenly feeble.
His words rebounded in my mind. Bouncing and thrashing around. They wouldn’t settle. Their full impact wasn’t sinking in.
He was telling me Laura had been killed.
And he’d done nothing about it.
He raised his hands, as if to fend off a blow.
‘You don’t know how it was,’ he said. ‘Let me finish. Hear me out.’