The Deep End, page 15
‘Well, you continue to be a drug dealer.’
‘No, I’m not. I gave it up, except for the odd bit here and there, like I gave to Katarina.’
‘We can argue the toss about that if you like, James, but your attack on PC Caldwell is going to put you back inside.’
He shrugged extravagantly, seemingly accepting the logic of that statement.
‘Tell me about the gun, James.’
‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist. It’s deactivated. There’s no firing pin.’
‘It’s not registered either, so that makes it illegal.’
‘Come on, it’s a technicality.’
‘Maybe, compared to the rest of the sentence you will be looking at. So why did you give it to her?’
‘I didn’t, really. I just left it at her place, because I didn’t want any awkward questions when the plods came to search mine.’
‘Why did you need it?’
‘I had some old scores to settle, people who needed to see that I couldn’t be pushed around. I just warned them off, that’s all.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘In a car boot sale.’
‘Come on, I wasn’t born yesterday,’ Talantire said.
Garrett shrugged. He clearly wasn’t going to tell her any more. She had one final question.
‘Did she know that it wouldn’t fire?’
‘Yes. I’m sure she wouldn’t have had it on the premises otherwise. I don’t know what she did with it after she moved. She didn’t return my call.’
Talantire told him where they had found it and he rolled his eyes in incredulity. ‘In the hallway? That is so stupid.’
‘Like you say, she didn’t want it in her home. It was well concealed.’
She left him to the desk sergeant to be charged and held in custody. Now it was light, she wanted to return to the caravan and the sheds to look again at the artwork Katarina had left behind. Talantire had a growing hunch that this was where the clue to her poisoning would be found.
* * *
She returned down the muddy farm track and saw that a rather miserable-looking police constable was posted by the door to the caravan. He was standing on the bottom step looking down upon a sea of mud, blowing on his hands to keep warm. He let her into the larger of the two sheds in which the life-size seashell sculpture dominated. She had seen before some of the tools which the artist had used, stored in boxes.
Using nitrile gloves, she carefully unpacked the boxes. There was a grinding wheel with a ceramic sanding disc, as well as tubs of glue and a variety of other artists’ tools. It was perhaps a little too much to expect PC Caldwell to have taken samples of all this for toxicology, but it was an obvious step on the road to establishing what exactly had poisoned her. She already had a theory about that. She’d googled it, and it did seem possible. She took samples of everything, including a dust mask, and stashed everything in carefully labelled evidence bags. She’d have these tested urgently. Getting to the bottom of the poisoning was well overdue, and she knew it could come from the coroner’s budget if necessary.
Before she left, she went back up to the farmhouse to thank Tony Conybeare for his cooperation and, in the warmth of the farm kitchen, she requested a big mug of coffee which she then delivered back to the PC.
Then, five hours later than scheduled, she signed off from her shift, and after depositing the evidence bags at Teignmouth Police Station ready for the courier, drove off to her afternoon Pilates course in Barnstaple. After that, she would stay the night at Adam’s house, where he had just got back from his break. She could hardly wait to see him. In just a few short weeks, he had become a pillar of her life.
Chapter Ten
‘I’d like you all to stand with your shoulders relaxed and just breathe in gently through your nose and exhale with your mouth,’ said Tina, standing svelte and poised in front of the class ‘After the excesses of Christmas and New Year, you might be feeling like dinosaurs, ready for extinction. But we’ll deal with that aching back with a trip to thoracic park, where we will be freeing up all of those sticky vertebrae.’
Talantire was standing amongst sixteen other women and two men in a gym in Barnstaple, in the first Pilates class of the New Year. It was a little crowded, with plenty of New Year resolutions in evidence from the new faces she saw. But among those were two latecomers, who were grabbing her attention and threatening to destroy any hope of relaxation in one of the few periods of me-time in her life.
PC Nadine Lister, her former live-in stalker, and Samantha Mahoney. What on earth?
DC Mahoney was, to Talantire’s knowledge, Brent West’s most recent girlfriend. Blue-eyed, dark-haired and shapely, she was the classic West girl, and perhaps prettier than all the rest of them. She also seemed to be sporting a tan, which made everyone else in the class look pasty. Nadine had been insistent that Sam had broken up with West for exactly the same reason that so many other women had: his overbearing and controlling personality, and his manipulative and domineering nature. Talantire wasn’t so sure. The two women were in the row behind her, and she felt their eyes upon her as Tina urged them to lie on their mats.
At the end of the class, Nadine and Sam made their way over.
‘A bit of a surprise, seeing you here,’ Talantire said.
‘You mentioned the class,’ Nadine said. ‘So I thought I’d enrol, and I let Sam know about it, too.’
Talantire had hoped she was shot of Nadine. She could hardly bear spending more time in the woman’s company. ‘How is Sunnysides?’ she asked.
‘It’s alright. Daniel is happy enough, but Millie seems to think it’s a prison camp.’
‘And how are you, Sam?’ Talantire asked, tentatively.
‘Been a bit rough the last couple of months,’ she said. ‘What with one thing and another.’ She seemed to be hinting at the breakup.
‘But you managed some time in the sun, I see?’
‘Yes, that was a couple of months ago, but I’ve been topping it up on the sun bed.’
‘That’s quite a workout,’ Nadine grumbled, staring at the class teacher, who was now collecting up various bits of equipment. ‘Is she an influencer or something?’
‘No, she’s a former prison officer. Anyway, you should be alright, you’re both nearly a decade younger than I am,’ Talantire said, as she gathered up her mat and headed to the door.
‘God, all those back movements, everything creaks and cracks,’ Nadine said. ‘I think my pelvic floor needs sanding down,’ she said with a laugh.
‘So what are you doing in this neck of the woods, Sam?’ Talantire asked, as they made their way to the car park. She knew Sam lived in Crediton about twenty miles west of Exeter.
‘My mum lives in Barnstaple, and I’m staying with her until tomorrow,’ Sam said. They said goodbye and headed off to their respective cars. Sam’s was parked next to Talantire’s, and just as she was getting in, she said: ‘Jan, I’ve got a contact in human resources, so I think we can find out who the original complainant was.’
‘Oh, who?’ Talantire asked, standing up again with the car door partially open.
‘She’s fairly new in post, but she’s on our side.’
Our side? Talantire wasn’t even sure whose side Sam was on. Sam was probably referring to Lakshmi. Talantire wasn’t going to reveal how much she knew about the staffing at the headshrinkers at Middlemoor. Devon and Cornwall police headquarters was a nest of vipers at the best of times. Anything Talantire said might get back to West. It was imperative that he didn’t get to know everything she was up to.
‘Do you have a minute?’ Talantire asked, gesturing to her passenger seat. Sam nodded, and got in.
‘Look, Jan, I know you probably don’t trust me, but…’
‘I’ve been burned before, Sam. Let’s see your phone.’
The detective constable offered up her Samsung. Talantire turned it off and placed it on the dashboard. ‘Just a precaution, Sam. You appeared to be in a relationship with Brent during the Bodmin Moor joyriders case, during which he spent a lot of time trying to undermine me.’
‘Was it that obvious?’ She seemed surprised.
Talantire gave a sharp laugh. ‘Blatantly: the lack of personal space between you, the informality and the fact you never took your eyes off his face except to looked daggers at me.’
‘Oh, sorry about that,’ she said, looking out of the window. ‘I really fell for him.’
‘It’s a large club, Sam, with enticing membership deals, but no one ever renews.’
Sam looked at her, before staring away again. ‘Brent really shafted me, you know.’
There were plenty of ways to take that comment, but Talantire softened a little when she saw Sam was on the verge of tears. She rested a hand on Sam’s shoulder while awaiting further revelations.
‘He got me pregnant and made me have an abortion.’
‘He made you?’
‘Well, he already had kids, and persuaded me how embarrassing it would be for him, and how it might damage his career because people would put two and two together if they saw me walking around with a swollen belly.’
‘It was all about him, then.’
She nodded. ‘He made it clear it would be over, too, if I kept the baby. And I couldn’t bear that.’ She began to weep, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘I was in love with him.’
Talantire dug out a box of tissues from the glove compartment and handed them to her.
‘Were you in love with him yourself, Jan?’ Sam asked.
‘I was smitten, certainly. But I have this guarded nature, and I don’t…’ She realised that she was revealing things she had never mentioned to any colleague. The steel door came down. I’m not going down this path with her. Sam could be using her own apparent vulnerability to draw out mutual confidences, that very same tool Talantire herself had used with other exes.
‘So how did it end?’ Talantire asked.
‘He went back to one of his previous girlfriends – some high-powered woman at the NCA – soon after he moved across to Avon and Somerset.’
Talantire tried to hide her shock. Rebecca Crossfield! It couldn’t be anyone else. Rebecca herself had hinted that she was still sleeping with him when she visited her in Liverpool. From her description, it had sounded like a dalliance. Fuck buddies, even. But West was apparently taking it seriously enough to have dumped Sam Mahoney, rather than stick to his normal MO, running both relationships in parallel. It certainly reinforced Rebecca’s own story, that she was the only one to have tamed him. But could she believe it? She wasn’t sure.
‘So when did you last see him?’ Talantire asked.
‘Not for weeks and weeks.’ Her eyelashes flickered a little as she said this, and broke eye contact.
It was a lie.
Talantire knew immediately. She had spent thousands of hours staring across the interview table at habitual liars, professional perjurers, fabulists, fabricators and fantasists. Some were absolutely brilliant, weaving threads of untruth into broad and verifiable canvases of fact. DC Samantha Mahoney was not one of them. There might be plenty of truth in what she said, particularly the pregnancy and abortion, but it was blatantly obvious to Talantire that Sam had been consorting with her enemy very recently. In which case, this whole approach to her, offering a mole at Middlemoor, might be a ruse.
Her job now was to hide her own realisation, not to let Sam know that she knew. If Sam was West’s Trojan horse, she must appear to bring her within the walls of the citadel of trust, where Talantire could feed her lies of her own that would get back to West. Disinformation. The meat and drink of espionage.
‘So do you think we will be able to get him?’ Sam asked.
‘No. I think he is too clever. My New Year’s resolution is to give up on this whole charade. He’s got too many friends in high places, and my own credibility is shot, thanks to a certain person not a million miles away.’ Talantire’s eyes followed Nadine’s Volkswagen as it left the car park. She could only hope that Sam would be taken in by this deceit. She doubted whether West would, when he heard about it. But she had to try.
‘I think you should press on with it; that’s what I want to do,’ Sam said. ‘I won’t rest until he is in jail.’
‘Well, good for you. I have to move on with the rest of my life. I’m on a final written warning, so I’ve got to be careful.’
‘Yes, Nadine told me.’
Thanks, Nadine.
‘I’ve got to go now, but thanks for making contact,’ Talantire said. Sam took her phone and got out of the car and into her own.
‘By the way, where was it you were on holiday?’ Talantire called across.
‘Morocco. It was lovely.’
Morocco? Seemed a popular place at the moment.
Talantire started the engine and reversed out. She watched carefully to see if Sam started to make a phone call. She didn’t. It would be too much of a giveaway if she immediately rang West.
As she drove home, she turned around in her head the conundrum she was caught in. DC Samantha Mahoney was clearly a clever woman, but what was she thinking? Granted, she must still be completely in thrall to West. She must have spent ages rehearsing this story with him. The courage required to come out here with Nadine, to Talantire’s home turf, to the Pilates class, and tell this raft of lies would be substantial. But even as Sam weaved this tale, pretending to hate her former lover, she must simultaneously be aware of the verifiable truth of the allegations about his behaviour. How could such contradictory positions exist in one person’s mind?
Talantire still hadn’t figured it out by the time she pulled into Adam’s drive. She had so much to tell him, and she craved his touch, his warmth and support.
* * *
The first Wednesday of the year dawned, crisp and cold. Talantire awoke in a strange bed, and her first action was to hug the sleeping man next to her. The warm cuddle: a much-underrated pleasure. She wanted to stay in that warm cocoon, but she couldn’t. She was back on day shifts for the next month, so she made sure she was up good and early. Last time she had stayed at Adam’s she had been horribly late for work, something that was quite out of character. As she drove in on the nearly hour-long journey to Barnstaple, she got a call from Primrose Chen.
‘Good morning, ma’am. You asked me to check on the mobile phone belonging to the victim’s son.’
‘Alex Brown, yes.’ Talantire knew that, despite not possessing the phone, they could find a great deal of information within it from the service provider on whose network it ran, simply by having the phone number and a warrant. Less that they had got from Katarina’s device perhaps, but useful, nonetheless. Messages, texts, emails, pictures; all stored on a backup server on the cloud.
‘I’ve only just started on it a few minutes ago, but I can already tell you one thing: six days ago, at the time he sent a message to us saying he was still in Morocco, the phone was actually in the UK. It had been in Morocco, back in October, because I can see the roaming carrier data. It’s mostly been off in the meantime.’
‘So Alex Brown is lying to us.’
‘It seems that way, ma’am.’
‘That makes him a very clear suspect. We’ve been slow on this, but I think we need to know a great deal more about him.’
The son might have had all sorts of reasons for wanting his mother dead, and there had clearly been a falling out. They’d been slack on this, she acknowledged to herself, but things were going to change now.
* * *
On arriving at the office at eight a.m., Talantire looked across CID. There was a pretty full complement of staff, the best turnout since before Christmas. She exchanged New Year greetings with those colleagues who hadn’t been in on the two previous days and felt good and ready to tackle her workload. She logged into the system and checked to see what was new. Dave Nuttall had had a success with a confession from Charlie Evans about the heating oil thefts, while Maddy was still knee-deep in various New Year’s Eve incidents, including two particularly nasty domestic assaults of the he said, she said variety where forensic investigation was required to support the victim’s case.
Consequently, nothing more had been done about the Katarina Lezcano case, which Maddy had already assumed to be a suicide and could await the return to work of PC Tim Caldwell.
Talantire was going to change that. She rang Alex Brown’s mobile and found she was unable to leave a message because the mailbox was full. She put a call in to Select Staff and asked for the full details on all the jobs and notes on file for Mr Brown. The receptionist she spoke to said they could do it by midday, when the manager came in. Talantire then applied for an extension to the warrant they already had for Brown’s electronic and communication devices to allow them to get a financial order and to enter his home address in Exeter. It was granted without any quibbling. She pulled up all the pictures that Primrose had already extracted from Ms Lezcano’s phone and flicked through the various images of her son. He was definitely someone she had seen before. Not a cop, not a criminal and no acquaintance she could think of. If he was a temp, there were all sorts of places you could have run into him.
There was a simple answer to this, and it took only a few minutes. She created an internal ‘wanted’ notice, a copy and paste image of Alex Brown and a brief background to the case, and distributed it on the daily newsletter which went to all frontline officers in the region.
It had only been out there five minutes when she got a screen-top message, followed in quick succession by half a dozen others. Alex Brown was well-known to dozens of officers. He had worked at Middlemoor for four months in the summer and resigned in September. He had been the PA to the assistant chief constable, Jeremy Noone.
Talantire was staggered to find this coincidence. Someone with close connections to the police had been lying to his mother, fair enough – who hasn’t done that – but wasn’t sufficiently worried about her death to get in contact with his former employer. He still hadn’t turned up. This was getting very strange indeed. She had a very bad feeling about it.
