Sam’s mind was reeling as he walked through the station, Joe’s words spinning in his mind. Until that moment, the day had been all about the murder of Henry Mason, the tense start of another investigation. Now, everything had changed. It was about Ellie’s killer. Could he have been under arrest so recently? Could it be so convenient?
He was sure Joe was wrong. Joe spent his working life finding doubts in certainties, but yet saw no doubt when there must be uncertainties. It was so long ago. People change. They get older or fatter or greyer. Sometimes they change hardly at all, but seventeen years? How could he be so sure?
The Incident Room was busy when he walked in, dragging him back into the day, like someone turning up the volume slowly, the meeting with Joe fading slightly. The atmosphere was filled with that hushed clamour, everyone on the phones but trying not to disturb each other.
Sam walked over to the terminal he used by the window and logged on, throwing his jacket around the back of the chair.
Charlotte was sitting opposite. She threw a newspaper onto his desk. The
Manchester Press
. ‘Have you seen the front page?’
Sam looked down and said, ‘Oh yeah,’ without taking it in.
‘Try reading it this time.’
Sam sighed.
Charlotte folded her arms. ‘Everything all right?’
He looked to her as his computer whirred itself awake. ‘Sorry, I’m a bit distracted.’
‘What is it?’
Sam couldn’t say what was really on his mind. ‘It’s about Ruby,’ he said, deflecting. ‘She’s staying at Joe’s for a while and I’m worried about Mum.’
‘Teenage girls can be worse than boys,’ Charlotte said. ‘Check out the paper.’
Sam looked down again, but he read it this time.
THE
DOMINO
KILLER
was emblazoned on the front page, with pictures of Keith Welsby and Henry Mason underneath, along with a blank rectangle containing just a question mark.
‘What the hell?’ He checked the byline. Lauren Spicer, the reporter who’d been hanging around the day before. ‘Who’s leaked?’
‘It wasn’t me, and I’m guessing it wasn’t you,’ Charlotte said. ‘But look who’s giving the quotes: our dear Chief Inspector Brabham.’
Sam read quickly. Brabham was quoted giving a summary of what had been said at an earlier press conference, except he scoffed at the suggestion of the name
Domino Killer
, telling the reporter that ‘
giving titles to people who kill gives them notoriety’
.
‘He was the first person to use the name,’ Sam said.
‘Exactly, but it gets his face in the paper. Look at his suit today.’
Sam looked over. Brabham was always smart, but today his suit looked new, tight to his body, and Sam thought he could see creases in his shirt where it had been folded in its wrapper.
‘What, you think Brabham leaked a name so he could deny it?’ Sam said.
‘Have you heard anyone else use the name?’
‘But it doesn’t even make sense. There are only two deaths. That’s not a domino effect.’
‘It doesn’t have to make sense,’ Charlotte said. ‘It just has to keep his profile high.’
Sam rubbed his eyes. He felt tired already.
‘Here, I’ll get you a drink,’ she said, and grabbed the mug from his desk, rings around the inside from coffees drunk but not washed away properly.
As soon as she was out of sight, Sam’s mind flashed back to what Joe had told him. He typed in the name ‘Mark Proctor’, and the entry from two nights ago came up.
It was the only entry against his name. His life before his recent arrest was invisible. No history, no intelligence, just the report from a bizarre incident two nights earlier, when he broke into the police compound to take his car back, before setting it alight.
Sam read the confidential report, the one completed by the officer in the case but never seen by the defence. Mark Proctor was a respectable man. A financial adviser. Married. No convictions. Why would he be breaking into the compound?
Sam knew there was only one answer: he had something to hide.
He went to the witness statements next, already uploaded onto the police server.
It had been a routine stop. Proctor had been driving home when he passed a traffic patrol car. They have cameras that scan oncoming traffic; if a car flashes up as not being on the insurance database, it’s pulled over.
The statement was brief. Proctor hadn’t said much; just waited until the recovery truck arrived and then walked off as his car was taken away, his ticket in his hand.
A few hours later, the car was ablaze and Proctor was in the back of a police van. Joe had turned up and his client had said nothing. And now Joe was convinced that he was responsible for Ellie’s murder.
Sam needed to find out more about Mark Proctor, if for no other reason than to persuade Joe that he had nothing to do with Ellie, so that he didn’t do anything stupid.
Then something occurred to him. The murder of Henry Mason. Proctor had been driving his car at around that time. It was tenuous, but it gave Sam an excuse to look further into it.
He went back to the witness statement and found a mobile number listed on the back of it.
Sam picked up the phone and dialled. It rang out for a while, until a sleepy voice said, ‘Hello?’
‘PC Wilkins?’
A pause, and then, ‘Yes?’
‘Sorry to disturb you at home. It’s DC Parker from the Major Incident Team. We’re looking into a murder the night before last, and I understand you stopped someone in a car.’
There was the rustle of bedclothes and then the voice became clearer. ‘I stopped a few people in cars. I’m a traffic officer.’
‘This was a car you impounded.’
A short laugh. ‘The guy who pinched his own car back from the compound? Yeah, a strange one, that.’
‘What can you tell me?’
‘Not much. Just a routine stop. He tried to charm us at first, you know, all the “yes officer, no officer” stuff you get, best buddy act, but it didn’t get anywhere with me. I’ve heard it all before.’
‘How did he come across?’
‘Nice guy, if I’m honest. All we want is to do our job and get no grief, and he didn’t give us any.’ A pause, and then, ‘There was one thing, though.’
‘Yes?’
‘All the time I was speaking to him, he was pleasant and friendly, understood that I was just doing my duty, but as I pulled away, once the tow-truck had taken the car away, I spotted him in my mirror, and he was staring as I went. Just like that, his arms by his side, staring. It seemed a bit weird.’
Sam frowned. ‘Okay, thank you.’ And he hung up.
Before he had chance to think any more about it, Charlotte arrived and put the cup on his desk. ‘We’ve had a development,’ she said.
He clicked off the screen. ‘Go on.’
‘They’ve found some suspect web searches on Henry Mason’s computer:
Lolita
.
Underage babes
.
Preteen
. All the nasty stuff you’d expect.’
‘Any images?’
‘Not yet, but you don’t come across search terms like that accidentally; he’d gone looking. Is that behind the fractured marriage: he’d been looking away from home but for someone younger than his wife?’
‘Younger than all wives, by the sound of it,’ Sam said. ‘But it didn’t look like that in the park. You know how paedophiles work. They do everything in secret, gain the trust of their victims. They don’t hang around in parks with flowers, like someone on a date.’
‘We’ve got the job of digging into that side of his life.’ Charlotte said. ‘At least we get a trip out of the office. We’ll speak to the people he worked with, his friends, see if we can find a darker side his wife doesn’t know about. Drink that and we’ll go.’
Sam raised his cup in agreement, but his mind was a long way from a man battered to death in a park. He was thinking about Mark Proctor, and what he could do to track him down.
Joe was nervous as he walked towards his office. This was the moment he’d been putting off: admitting the secret he’d held for so many years to the one person who should have known all along.
He turned round to look at the scene around him. The gardens, the rhododendron bushes blossoming over the metal railings, the slow bustle of people, men and women in dark suits, some carrying coffee, others grabbing a last cigarette before the office confines stubbed out their habit for a few hours. White sash windows in brick fronts. This was his day, the scene that greeted him most mornings, but everything seemed different somehow. And it was because of Mark Proctor. This was where he became real, all of his details in a slender file. His address. His signature.
He looked up at the building. Gina was watching him from a window.
Marion greeted him in the usual way as he breezed past. ‘Can you call Gina and ask her to go to my room,’ he said to her and then took the stairs two at a time. When he got to his room, he leaned back against the doorjamb, his heart pounding. As he heard her footsteps in the corridor, he stepped away from the door.
When she came in, she held up two files and said, ‘Your clients for the morning: an assault outside a restaurant, some road rage thing, two men who wouldn’t walk away. And I’ve arranged a prison visit for you later. Someone who reckons he was fitted up by someone to take the blame for a murder.’
‘I’m not interested.’
Gina frowned. ‘You all right, Joe? I saw you walking in. You looked agitated.’
‘We need to talk.’
‘What’s going on? When you get like this, it’s usually bad news.’
‘This isn’t about me,’ he said. ‘It’s about Ellie.’
‘Ellie? I don’t understand.’
Joe took a deep breath. This was it. Once he said it, there was no going back.
‘You said yesterday that there were no suspects for Ellie’s murder,’ he said. ‘I want to know the truth. You weren’t holding back to protect yourself, or the investigation?’ Joe tried to bore into Gina’s eyes, to gauge her response. ‘I don’t mean lines of inquiry; I mean actual suspects. Anyone you think might have done it but just couldn’t prove it?’
Gina flushed, her eyes angry. She took a deep breath before speaking slowly and deliberately. ‘You’re accusing me of lying to you about Ellie’s murder. I’ve never done that. She was your sister so I’ll let it go, but don’t ever accuse me of lying again. We’ve known each other too long for this.’
‘Thank you, I believe you,’ he said.
‘Ellie’s case was one of the most frustrating investigations I’ve ever been involved with,’ Gina continued. ‘It was a horrible crime, sick and depraved, and whoever killed her was bound to do it again. It wasn’t just that, though, because all murders are horrible, a waste of a life. Ellie’s youth just made it more so. No, it was the emptiness of the investigation, that there were no good leads at all. It was impossible to track down any cars in the area because it was just after school closing time, so there were cars everywhere. There were people everywhere, it seemed, except down that path where Ellie was murdered. I’m sorry, Joe.’ A pause, and then, ‘What’s this about? Why now?’
Joe thought about how to phrase it, and realised that there was no other way than directly. ‘There was an eyewitness. Me.’
Gina opened her mouth as if to say something but stopped and cocked her head. ‘What do you mean?’ she said eventually.
‘I saw him. I was walking home from college and Ellie was walking in front of me. She was some distance away. She had her headphones on and I didn’t want to walk with her anyway. It was my eighteenth birthday; walking with my annoying little sister wasn’t on my list for the day.’
‘Joe, I don’t understand.’
‘I watched her head into that wooded path, where we’d always told her not to go. There was a man there, in a hooded top. He looked at me and then followed Ellie down the path.’
Gina’s mouth hung open, her eyes wide in disbelief. ‘Joe?’
‘I faltered. I should have followed her, because I felt uneasy, but then I told myself that she’d be all right. She was so close to home. Why would she be at risk?’
‘I can’t believe you’re telling me this.’ Her hands were on her hips. She was shaking her head, her cheeks flushed. The steady tick of the clock filled the tense silence until she slammed her hand on the desk, making Joe jump and look at her. ‘You should have told me!’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ he said. His throat tightened and the sharp sting of tears made him blink. ‘Don’t you think I wish I’d done it differently, that I hadn’t been such a coward back then, more worried about being blamed than finding her killer? But it wouldn’t have brought her back. I was just a kid; eighteen was just a number. I was scared, and because I stayed quiet then, I’ve been tormented by it ever since. Nothing you can say will hurt me more than my own thoughts.’
‘What about the fact that you might have allowed him to kill again?’ Gina said, her voice rising. ‘People like Ellie’s killer don’t do something like that as a random act, a one-off, an experiment. They build up to it, spend years fantasising about it, and once they act on it, they do it again and again until they’re caught. Even if Ellie was the first, she won’t have been the last.’
Joe didn’t respond to that. It was something he’d considered through all of those years: that his silence had cost the lives of other people. It added to his guilt.
‘Whatever I could tell you couldn’t have caught him, though,’ he said.
‘Is that the best you can do?’
‘I asked you if there were any suspects and you said no, so it wouldn’t have narrowed anything down.’
‘But it might have helped with an appeal,’ Gina said, exasperated. ‘Anything helps, you know that. If you’d have told us what he was wearing, or his age or his build, or just about fucking anything, someone else might have seen him. They might have come forward with a better description, or even a name.’
‘All right, I get it,’ he said. ‘I messed up, I know that. I’ve always known that.’
‘It’s not just that,’ she said, tears in her eyes now. ‘You’ve made me feel insignificant, because I tried to look out for you. I felt guilty that I couldn’t find Ellie’s killer; it was my responsibility to do that. All the time, you were keeping this from me.’
‘It was our tragedy, not yours,’ Joe said, but as soon as he saw the colour rise in Gina’s cheeks, he wished he could take the words back.
‘I feel like I don’t know you,’ Gina said, shaking her head. ‘I feel let down, betrayed, and lots of other emotions I can’t quite work out.’
‘Gina, I’m sorry. But it’s not about us any more. This thing has driven me. There’s a darkness in here that you haven’t seen.’ And Joe slapped his chest with the palm of his hand. ‘Do you know why I became a criminal lawyer? Because it was the one career I could have where I might see him again. Like you say, they don’t stop at one. I’ve dreamed of revenge ever since, to feel my own hands around his neck. This is why I’m telling you now.’
‘Let’s hope you never meet the guy then. For your sake.’
Joe didn’t respond. He didn’t raise an eyebrow or give a shrug, nothing to give away the truth, but Gina guessed it from his silence.
‘You’ve seen him,’ she said, her hand going to her mouth.
Joe nodded.
They both stayed silent as Joe let Gina take it in. She stared at the files on the desk, tapping her index finger against her thumb, until she looked up and said, ‘Who is he?’
‘Mark Proctor.’
Gina burst out in a laugh. ‘Mark Proctor. You’re kidding?’
Joe shrugged.
‘You’re serious?’ she said. ‘He’s small-time. The police are just angry that a car was stolen from their garage. They had to get someone, and by making it Proctor they’re hoping he’s too worried about himself to make a fuss about the police losing his car. The most they can show is that he didn’t have any insurance.’
‘What did you make of him?’
‘Quiet, but friendly enough. Just unlucky to be caught up in a situation. There was no suspect in Ellie’s case, and the name of Mark Proctor never came up. I would remember him, the name at least. Definitely no Mark Proctor.’
‘I knew it was him as soon as I saw him.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s not enough. Think like a lawyer. What would you say to a witness saying the same as you?’
Joe didn’t have to say it. They both knew the question: have you ever been on the street and about to say hello to someone, only to realise at the last moment that it wasn’t who you thought it was? It was the slam-dunk question in any recognition case: say no, and the witness isn’t believed, because everyone’s done it; say yes and the witness has admitted that mistakes in recognition are made. Heads we win, tails you lose.
‘That’s why I’m going after more.’
‘What the hell are you talking about, Joe?’
‘I’m going to find out more about Proctor. We can both do it. Work with me, Gina. I want to present evidence to the police, because a name won’t be enough. My evidence won’t be enough.’
‘You should have done more for me, all those years ago.’ She shook her head. ‘What are you hoping to find that the police won’t?’
‘I know his sister.’
‘You what? How the hell do you know her?’
‘I looked her up and took her out last night. Gina, I need to know more about him, to dig deeper with her, find out his secrets, follow him.’
‘Joe, it’s no good. You’ve left it too late. And for us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think? Have you any idea how angry I am? I feel betrayed. I’ve tried to look after you through the years. I don’t do maternal, but for you, I wanted to protect you. But now?’ She shook her head. ‘You’ve broken everything. Goodbye, Joe.’
She walked towards the door. As she passed Joe, he reached out and grabbed her arm. ‘What do you mean, goodbye?’
‘What do you think I mean?’ she said, pulling her arm away. ‘I quit. I need some time on my own. I’m sorry, Joe, but I can’t look at you. Not right now.’
And with that, she went.
Joe went to the window and looked out. Gina rushed out onto the street. Her hand went to her cheeks to wipe something away. Tears, he presumed. As she went into the park, he lost sight of her behind the leaves and blooms.
He grabbed the court file and headed for the door. He needed to get rid of his client and then he was going after Proctor.