Killing Time, page 26
The house was beautiful. Not huge, but a sturdy stone house of a certain age. Oozing with character and with ornate sash windows and a slate roof, it sat beautifully and was fitting of its surroundings. Rob felt this was a retirement well lived, following a long and successful career.
The front door was traditional and solid, with a large brass knocker that Rob rapped twice.
Eric McCann opened the door and smiled. He was taller than Rob had expected, with a look of wisdom and a real aura of authority. His smart grey hair sat to one side, he was wearing a pale blue sweater with a white shirt and a tie underneath, which Rob guessed was his standard apparel. He offered his hand and invited Rob in. He was bright and chirpy. It was a positive start.
“So you’d like to talk about the Leicester robberies, Mr Rhone.”
It wasn’t a real question but kicked proceedings off following several minutes of small talk, as Rob took a sip from the cup of tea he’d been offered, which had arrived in a china cup and saucer.
“I do, Your Honour.” Rob was formal, respectful.
A hand was raised to bat the formalities away. “Please call me Eric, Mr Rhone.”
“I’d like to understand what you can recall from the case you presided over, Eric. The people involved, how the trial played out, and your memories of the five men and their families from the time.”
Laura Mathers had spoken to Eric McCann directly several days earlier. She had primed him for the case, and reminded him of the names in question. The protagonists. He’d had the last few days to pick his brain.
“They were a real mixed bunch. Charlie and Joe led the gang, from memory. Decided on the details. Ruled with fear. They were men accustomed to a life against the law, and the likes of you and I were a way of life and an occupational hazard, Inspector.”
“Did the trials play out normally, from what you can remember? Were there any interruptions or controversy that you recall?”
“The odd outburst. They were aggressive men. Two of them were, anyway. The other three were quite timid in comparison, almost seemed intimidated by the courtroom and took their medicine to some degree. I sentenced them all in accordance with the guidelines of the time and there were no threats. The three were quiet and looked remorseful. I remember Joe Davies and Charles Worth looking vengeful, but there was no drama. I don’t recall anything from the gallery either.”
“What about the details around the trial, Eric? Evidence that was inadmissible or deals done with the prosecution. Things the jury didn’t see.”
Eric McCann sighed, he looked frustrated. It showed in the deep frown lines between his eyes. Laura Mathers had explained the issues around the investigation, the sensitive nature of recent developments, and how the team were battling questionable records and missing files. Eric’s age had given him a certain belligerence, a contempt for what in his mind shouldn’t need to be asked of him. Rob knew what he was asking but wanted to go fishing, hoping the grey cells could recount something salient.
Eric took his time, took a sip of his tea and pondered. His expression tempered.
“The CPS had only been established for a couple of years before I tried the men. It was new and finding its feet. The police were desperate to prosecute the men for three robberies, but the evidence was patchy and the CPS didn’t go for it. The belief was that the gang had committed a third robbery, and on balance, they probably did. The issue they had was that the MO was different, and not all five of the gang had been involved. There was no CCTV, and the circumstances were different enough for the prosecution to struggle to make a case for the third robbery.”
Rob nodded, acknowledging a statement he largely knew.
“There was a lot of debate in chambers. Arguing. The prosecution really wanted to go for it. To have them for all three. Nobody disputed that it wasn’t a five-man attack, there just wasn’t the evidence to progress with it.”
Rob sat silently, listening to every word.
“An agreement was reached that the gang would plead guilty to the two robberies and any charges for the third crime would be dropped. It wasn’t broadly palatable but it guaranteed a conviction.”
“Who wasn’t it palatable to, Eric?”
“Everybody really. Joe and Charlie were involved, that was clear to see, and by pleading guilty they saved themselves a lot of time in prison. They had the most to lose. Paul Harris couldn’t have been involved, and Daniel Mortimer was alibied, although that was challenged heavily.”
“What was the issue with his alibi?”
“His alibi came from Paul Harris’s wife. Elizabeth. The third robbery was only three men, I think. Paul couldn’t have been there and Daniel was cleared by Elizabeth Harris. There just wasn’t enough evidence to proceed for all three robberies; it would have compromised the whole case, and they could have been acquitted on all charges and walked. The CPS were not happy at all, from memory, but this was the best way to secure a conviction. It was viewed as a win.”
“Who didn’t win? Who lost out? Or who didn’t think that was the best way?”
“The third robbery was hard. The jeweller was attacked. Badly hurt. He was very badly beaten, I recall. It was similar to the first robbery, but I recall the shopkeeper was on his own. It was his shop and he was the only one there, and he stood up for himself.”
Rob was silent. The untouched ground was appearing beneath his feet. Its relevance was crystal clear as Eric McCann continued to reveal his memories.
“I don’t think the third robbery was lucrative, but they almost forgot about the robbery part and took it upon themselves to turn it into a beating. The police pursued it as attempted murder initially, it was that strong. The guy only just made it. He spent a lot of time in hospital and I think he ended up taking his own life. He never did recover and he lost his business. He had a wife and a young daughter and life would have been very tough for them after that.”
Rob sat dumbfounded. He could barely believe what he was hearing, the criticality of the information screaming.
“What happened during the attack, Eric? Can you remember?”
“I’ll never forget. I saw a lot as a trial judge, even in those days, you understand. They were armed. Bats and a sawn-off shotgun. There was a lot of shrapnel from the broken cabinets and the guy tried to fight back, even after they’d hit him a few times. He didn’t desist. He fell on a lot of glass and was kicked and dragged across it. He was badly cut. He still tried to fight. His left hand was stamped on or struck with clubs. The glass and the impact severed two of the fingers on one of his hands. He lost them. The surgeon couldn’t save them. He did well to save his life.”
Rob swallowed hard, gobsmacked by what he’d just heard.
“Was that the full extent of his injuries?”
“No, he lost an ear as well. Or most of it, anyway.” Eric McCann dropped it into the conversation like a bomb. “He was battered to one side of his head. A lot of his injuries were due to that. His ear was nigh on ripped from the side of his head. They tried to sew it back on but they couldn’t. They might have been able to save it today, better surgery and methods, but back then there was too much damage. It was a disgusting crime, Inspector Rhone. They left that poor man for dead.”
Eric recoiled in his chair, the horrors of the memory spilling back into his mind decades after being laid to rest. Filed away but not forgotten.
“Can you recall his name, Eric?”
“Terry Morley. His name was Terry Morley.”
Chapter 54
Fucking bitch. How she’s got the nerve to float around like Little Miss Innocent… It just feels like a fresh kick in the teeth, and after everything I’ve been through. Years in the planning, years in the making… And now I’m so fucking close. I’m about to lose everything one way or another and it’s like a final taunt. An insult on top of an insult.
It’ll just make the final piece that little bit more enjoyable. Pleasurable.
At least now she’s exposed. Out in the open. Rob and the team seem to be slowly cottoning on to what’s unfolding, if just a little too slowly. Too slowly for her, anyway. My God, they’re close.
The last few weeks have gone to plan, though. They’ve been very, very satisfying. Killing Daniel Mortimer was a different experience. Navigating those terrace gardens, the thrill of executing him with the police sat outside, yards from where I smashed his head in.
Of course he was there. Lying bitch.
That was exhilarating. I was buzzing for hours that night. It was electric.
I was expecting to have to wait until long after dark, until he was tucked up in bed. But it was wide open, and all the while he just sat in his chair with his Beats on after a day at work. It was so perfect I simply couldn’t have planned it.
Killing him was a bit like Joe Davies, only I didn’t get to see the look on his face. There was simply no time. That was a shame, but I wasn’t sure I’d get this far. Dad would be proud of my determination, if not my methods. I made it to Mortimer. Undetected.
Smashing him around the head was such a relief, so enjoyable. It was also long overdue. He had it coming, and hearing the crack of his skull was immense. Over and over. It felt good to see his life ebb away while he lay there, defenseless, his body twitching. I hope the last thing that went through his mind was what he did that day and what he did to my family. I whispered my name to him.
I whispered my name to each of them. Told them who I was. Told Charlie Worth before I got going whose daughter I was. Made them look me in the eye so they knew why they had to die. And then I took their lives. They all knew why. Decades-old vengeance was finally being served.
And so it comes to her. To why she must die too. She is still guilty, despite not being in Dad’s shop that day. She’s just guilty in a different way. Her way. Ultimately, I’m still not sure who was in the shop that day and who wasn’t, and neither were the police, but if you live by the sword, you’ll fucking die by it.
Maybe they didn’t all have to die, but they still did it. One way or another, they did it. They were responsible. They robbed those jewellers. Decent people, decent men and women, just looking to earn a living in the right way.
Dad was never the same again. He couldn’t have been. I watched him suffer. I watched my mum suffer. The times weren’t kind. There was no compensation for us. For Dad. No support, no victim groups to talk to. Society didn’t understand and wasn’t compassionate towards those who were different. Times were hard for the disabled, the blind, the deaf. Society looked differently at you. Judged you. Going to the supermarket with Dad with a mutilated ear and missing fingers… They used the word maimed. They talked about him. He hated himself. Hated being looked at like that. Felt like a circus stooge. He became reclusive, more and more withdrawn, and was a shadow of himself until the day he took his own life.
The day he left me and Mum behind.
Those men would never have been released if they’d been convicted of dad’s murder, but they couldn’t decide who to charge, and she was responsible for that. She lied for him and they all got away with it.
Who was there, who wasn’t. Whether it was even the same gang, or another gang operating in a similar way.
It was them. Joe was there, Charlie was definitely there. The rest is just semantics. Detail. But when you cut out cancer, you cut out the whole fucking thing. Which leads me to the final piece.
One to go.
Chapter 55
It felt like hours before Rob got through to Nicky, his signal having been threadbare and failing for miles as he’d headed out of North Devon. He’d hit redial on his bluetooth time and time again until the dialling tone connected and Nicky’s phone rang.
“Nicky! Can you hear me?” Rob looked at the signal bars on the display of his car.
“Gaffer, we’ve got a new theory that we need to look at!”
Rob was taken aback. Nicky had got in first and Rob suspected that the importance of the comment must be high. Nicky knew where Rob had been and hadn’t bothered to ask; she’d dived in. Rob invited her to continue.
“We’ve got a view on the perp and why the murders have gone the way they have; with the nature of the early murders everything pointed to the killer being one of the gang, and Mortimer in particular. We’d worked on the basis that the use of drugs and the injury pattern was indicative of an elderly killer. The force of the injuries and the depth versus the amount all making one of the gang highly likely, and consistently so.”
She paused. Rob was intrigued. He’d worked out where Nicky was going with it but was eager to hear her spell it out. Eager to find out how she’d got there. Their paths were aligning, and they both now knew the relationship of their murderer to the victims. Nicky stopped the suspense and spat out what her, Jen and Becky had reached as a conclusion.
“We think the killer is a child of one of the original victims, Rob, almost certainly the third robbery given the lack of evidence around it and the fact that we’ve had sight of relatives from both the Stefan’s and Laxmi raids. They either didn’t lose a relative or simply don’t have the level of hatred required to commit the crimes we’ve seen… Rob, are you there?” Nicky asked, thinking she’d just shared her thoughts with Rob unable to hear her.
“I got it, Nicky, and you’re right. It’s a guy called Terry Morley; we need to find his family, and more importantly his daughter.”
Nicky was taken by surprise. She’d expected a challenge. A question. Something to rebuke her idea and make her question her own thinking, make her doubt herself and check over and over again until it was irrefutable. That would come, but for now Nicky’s intrigue flipped and she asked Rob why he was so sure, why he’d agreed with her so easily.
“The third robbery holds the key, Nicky. It’s all in there. The reason this is happening is all down to a robbery we know very little about.”
“What did McCann tell you?”
The conversation looped back to the place Rob had expected it to start.
“The third robbery was savage, more so than the other two. The jeweller was alone, a guy named Terry Morley. He was badly beaten, and although the method was almost identical to the first two robberies, the gang wasn’t the full complement. They were never sure if William Reynolds was there, and there were doubts over Harris and Mortimer too. They all thought Charlie and Joe were there, but the evidence was patchy and the defence team worked on copycat, so they pleaded on the two we’ve investigated and got to walk for the third. No charges were ever brought.”
Nicky knew there was more. Rob had a way with a narrative and she knew she was being led to a point. She couldn’t decide what it was and knew better than to second guess.
“The beating, the glass, the violence. He was assaulted so badly, and beaten so severely that they had to remove one of his ears.”
“Holy fuck. And Eric McCann just spilled all this out?”
“He did, calm as you like. Like he was recanting a lost memory. Morley lost fingers too, Nicky, they were crushed and severed amongst the melee. He lost two of them at the hospital.”
Nicky sat. A pause. The realisation that had struck Rob like a hammer an hour or so earlier was now doing the same to her.
“He had a wife and a daughter, Nicky. I want to check both but I think only the daughter is viable. Its revenge in the most literal form, and the injuries we have mirror those that Terry Morley endured in the attack on his jewellers all those years ago. It has to be her.”
“What do you need us to do, Rob?”
“Speak to Jack. I need him to go and ask some firmer questions of Elizabeth Harris. She gave Daniel Mortimer an alibi, I want to know if she’s holding anything else back. If she is, it could mean that we’re not done. Mortimer has been murdered for his part, whatever that was, so somebody thought he was there. Somebody has held him responsible, and if they think Elizabeth protected a guilty man she could be at risk.”
“The records aren’t there, Rob, Jack would have found them. There was nothing in the archive.”
Her statement was matter of fact, and Rob agreed. The records of the third robbery weren’t there. They’d been removed. The ‘when’ could come later, but both knew this would trigger a line that should allow them to identify the person responsible for removing the records.
“I need you and Jen to find out who she is. Get Becky involved, she might be able to dig at the Royal and save some time. If there are birth and death records it’s highly likely they’ll still be there. The pool will be small based on age alone.”
“I’ll get her on it straight away, plus I’ve got an idea that might help.”
*
Nicky drove south down the London Road, passed the train station and had decided to ditch her car in the car park behind the police station, just behind a busy entrance that Royal Mail vans were recklessly piling in and out of. Jen was waiting, and the two made the short walk across the London Road to the Leicester Mercury offices, less than a quarter of a mile from the office where the investigation had been unfolding.
Nicky and Jen walked through the front door of a tired looking building, not dissimilar to Lodge House, only without the high-rise element and the rattle from the train line. Nicky was on the phone to Becky, with the walk providing an injection of fresh, cool air to both the face and brain.
Nicky was on the phone to Becky as they entered the building; she flashed her warrant card to the receptionist and muttered, “Natalie Allen, please” without lowering the iphone. Her conversation with Becky was happening in conjunction to their line of inquiry. The race to the truth.
