Bad Blood (23 page)

A minute or so later the car was turning round, red taillights moving away and disappearing into the distance. Then the Shogun exploded. Everything went white as the camera’s sensor overloaded before the exposure compensated and reds and oranges and yellows filled the screen. There was something else as well, something on the soundtrack for a few seconds. Matthew Harrison screaming as the flames consumed his body.

‘Well?’ The man pulled down the lid of the laptop and zipped up the bag. ‘In the light of your meeting with ACC Heldon earlier today, would the Inspector like to make a statement?’

‘Who the fuck are you and what do you want?’

‘I need some help. A favour or two.’ He pulled a photograph from an outside pocket on the bag and then hefted the bag on to his shoulders. He snapped the photograph down on the seawall and started to walk down the steps. ‘In case you forget. Bye now, I’ll be in touch.’

‘Where’s Vanessa?’ Savage shouted after him, snatching up the photo before it blew away.

‘She’s fine. Don’t worry about her, she’s smart and can take care of herself.’ The man became a shadow as he walked by the fishermen with their lights. ‘See you soon, Charlotte.’

Savage squinted at the photo, realising it was a still from the video showing her next to the wrecked car. She crumpled the paper, shoved it in a pocket and turned and grasped the railing in front of her with both hands, gripping tight to steady herself. She stared out across the Sound where the water swirled, moved by unseen forces, pinpricks of white starlight dancing on the black surface.

Fuck! Who the hell was the guy? And where had he got the footage from?

She turned around again and leant against the rail, looking back along the breakwater towards the lights in the car park at the end and the glow from the pub. Closer, the two fishermen turned to eye a woman passing them. She was dressed for the town centre with a halter top full of promise, a miniskirt cut close to the tops of her thighs, but the low-level lighting set into the seawall cast a yellow glow onto flat, sensible shoes.

‘Ma’am?’ A woman’s voice hissed in the darkness. Calter. ‘Is that you? Are you OK?’

They had drunk the bottle of Malbec and only the dregs remained in a cheaper bottle of nameless red sitting on the living room table. Savage leant on Pete’s shoulder as he dozed on the sofa beside her.
Newsnight
flickered on the TV, the volume turned way down, Jeremy Paxman scowling out from the screen.

The incident with Vanessa and the man on Mountbatten Breakwater had scared her and when she arrived home Pete picked up on her mood straight away. Savage mumbled something about the Standards interview and said she was knackered, stressed, and overworked and needed some downtime. They put the kids to bed and ate late, Pete not asking her about opening another bottle of wine once the first had gone. After the meal they slouched in front of the TV watching some mindless crap and Pete massaged her shoulders before he drifted off.

On the television a politician squirmed in his seat as Paxo put the knife in and twisted. Savage knew how the poor man felt. The only difference being in her case the person twisting the blade into her
was
themselves
a politician.

Councillor Alec Jackman. Deputy leader of Plymouth City Council and a prominent member of the Devon and Cornwall Police and Crime Panel.

Out on the breakwater the man had seemed familiar, but it was only when she’d arrived home and strode into the kitchen and saw his face staring out from the front page of the
Herald
– Jackman and a group of councillors touring the Drake Circus shopping centre – that she’d realised his identity. She’d dropped the carriers containing the shopping on top of the paper and grasped the back of a chair to steady herself. When Pete had asked if something was wrong she’d been tempted to say ‘wrong’ was the understatement of the year. Instead she’d pointed to the bottle poking out from amongst the shopping and told him to find a corkscrew.

Now, as she lay curled up against Pete, she wondered what the hell Jackman wanted from her. Something to do with Redmond’s death? The Tamar Yachts MD had, she remembered, been Jackman’s brother-in-law. If that was the case why couldn’t he just report his concerns in the usual way?

Savage didn’t want to think of the possibilities or what might happen if she didn’t do exactly as Jackman wanted, but try as she might she couldn’t push the thought from her mind. The video footage clearly showed her leaving Harrison to burn to death in the car. Dismissal from the force could only follow from such a revelation and criminal charges would be more than likely.

She looked across at Pete. His eyes were closed but he had a smile on his face. Lost in a dream. How would he take the news if all should come out? Would he stand by her or would he feel betrayed? After all, she hadn’t confided in him. He’d be protective of the children, but other than that Savage realised she had no idea how he would react. The thought brought a queasiness to her stomach, as if she was in their little boat at the top of a huge wave and about to crash down into the trough.

At that moment a buzzing came from the table. Her phone. An incoming text message.

Pete stirred, but his eyes only opened for a moment before fluttering shut again. Savage reached for the phone. The number was an unfamiliar one. She clicked to read the message.

Remember, remember that night in November.

A chill iced along her fingers and up her arms causing her to shiver. Only one person could have sent the message. Bastard. Jackman wasn’t going to let this go and was using a classic blackmail technique: pile on the pressure before making any demands so that when they came, acceding to them would seem by far the easiest option. Savage untangled herself from Pete and went into the kitchen. Her fingers hovered over the phone. Her instinct was to call Jackman and scream at him, but that would only show he had unsettled her. Better to ignore the message. She took a number of deep breaths and then switched the phone off.

She went back into the living room. Pete had woken and was staring at the TV, where the credits rolled over Paxman’s darkened studio. She held out her hand to him, sighing and feeling as if she was ready to drop.

‘Come on old sailor,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

Back home in Mannamead, Jackman pulled back the sliding door in the living room and stepped out into the garden to have a cigarette. A breeze tingled against his face. Cold. Stars above the city glow. Way up high, something strobing against the black night. A plane, heading west, out of here.

His wife, Gill, was upstairs in bed trying to sleep, but mostly just crying. Jackman had been up there, put his arm around her, handed her tissue after tissue as she talked about her brother Gavin. Jackman wanted to shake her and tell her that Redmond had been a loser, that she’d scarcely had a good word to say about him when he was alive. Instead, he listened to her rabbiting on about how she wished she’d spent more time with him, helped him more, been more of a family. It was all too late now, she said, but they would have to make amends, see what they could do for Vanessa. She was family too, wasn’t she?

‘Yes,’ Jackman had said, tucking his wife down and kissing her on the cheek. ‘Of course she is.’

Jackman fired up, sucked in, breathed out. The smoke slipped away into the night air, his thoughts swirling round too. After the meeting with DI Savage he’d had an argument with Vanessa. She’d called him an old fogey and he’d slapped her. Wanted her after that too, but she’d buggered off to meet some friends, leaving him to return home. Never mind, she’d be sorry later, he was sure of it. Maybe he would need to be a little more understanding. She’d just lost her dad after all. Maybe Gill was right about needing to do more for Vanessa. If only the silly cow knew.

Somewhere a few streets off a police siren grew in tone and volume. Jackman smiled to himself, relishing the irony in the words that came to mind as the sound fell away and the unseen vehicle sped into the night.

Cop car.

Out on the breakwater things couldn’t have gone better. The shock on the bitch’s face, visible in the glare from the laptop, had been well worth waiting for. But the shock was the least of the woman’s problems. Soon he’d follow up the meeting, turn the screw, get what they needed. Yes, they could still get out of this one, emerge on top. With a little help from their friends.

Nr Bovisand, Plymouth. Tuesday 22nd January. 7.10 a.m.

Savage hadn’t slept well. The wine she had hoped would send her off had instead kept her awake, her head buzzing with the incident with Jackman. She must have caught a couple of hours, but all too soon the window behind the curtains began to lighten, the new day inescapable. She heaved herself out of bed and stood in the shower for much longer than usual, as if the water might wash away the memory, the evidence or both. Breakfast and readying the kids for school was accomplished on autopilot and the drive to work seemed to take forever. On arrival at the station she half-expected to be summoned to Hardin’s office, imagining her fellow detectives waiting there to arrest her.

In the foyer, the desk sergeant nodded a greeting before returning to his paperwork. A fresh-faced DC smiled as he passed her in the corridor. As she entered the Major Crimes suite, DCI Garrett asked her if she wanted a coffee. Obviously ‘murderer’ wasn’t tattooed on her face, nor had a warrant been issued; Councillor Jackman had kept quiet. Savage felt relieved for a moment, but then the anxiety returned. If Jackman wasn’t taking the legal route – the route the well-respected deputy leader might be expected to take – then he wanted something else.

She tried to erase the thought from her mind as she strolled across to Calter and Enders. Calter babbled into a phone while Enders sat at his desk, peering at his screen and running his finger down a list of registered and suspected sex offenders.

‘DS Collier told me to carry on searching for an intermediate, um, node. Someone Owers may have associated with who knew Redmond. No chance the Liston girl might have known Owers is there? Make our life a bit easier if she had.’

‘No,’ Savage said, hoping Enders wouldn’t ask what had happened last night. ‘I got nothing useful from her. Anyone else?’

Enders brought up a pretty diagram on his screen. Collier’s arcs of probability had increased to four, but the new one appeared as flimsy as the first three. Enders pointed to one of the lines and began to fill Savage in when Calter put her phone down, the clatter as she did so turning heads.

‘We’ve fucking got him, ma’am!’ she said, face beaming.

‘Who have we … er, “fucking got”?’ Savage asked.

‘Stuart Chaffe. The guy you chased the other day. The one with the van seen over near Durnford Street the night Owers disappeared. The prat had a shunt on the Tamar Bridge. Starts a fight with another motorist and we get called. Response take a look at the bridge cameras and realise the van and Chaffe are on our to-do list. When the patrol turns up he is stuck in the jam with nowhere to go. So the nutter jumps.’

‘No!’

‘Yeah, right. Well the MOD Police picked him out of the water down near the docks. Gave him a cup of tea and a pair of handcuffs. He’s being taken to Charles Cross at this moment.’ Calter grinned. ‘Happy days, yes?’

When they entered the interview room at Charles Cross, Savage was not pleased to see a local solicitor called Amanda Bradley alongside Stuart Chaffe. Bradley was all heels, legs and teeth. Plus just the right amount of cleavage showing where the top three buttons of her shirt were undone. A whole lot of style but very little substance. Savage had often wondered how she’d managed to pass her law exams and even more amazingly how she’d gained a partnership in one of the most respected firms in the county.

Chaffe sat impassive, hair still wet, clothing looking like something the custody officer had dredged up from the lost property box: shell suit trousers and a baggy fleece several sizes too big for his gangly frame. As Savage and Enders entered he chuckled and then spat into his plastic beaker, plonking it down on a Formica table stained with coffee, tea and burn marks.

‘Well I never, the Jehovah Duo. Spare me all that crap from the other day and absolve me of my sins, would you?’

‘I don’t think even the Pope could do that, Stuart,’ Savage said as she took a seat. ‘Not from the look of the list I’ve seen.’

‘I understand my client has been arrested on suspicion of murder,’ Bradley said, pointing a pink-nailed finger down at a printed sheet in front of her. ‘The evidence, such as it is, being entirely circumstantial, I suggest we get on with the interview and then he can be released.’

They did just that, Enders preparing the tapes and pointing out the video camera, Chaffe shrugging and shaking his head, muttering about having ‘done nothing’ as Bradley made some notes.

Savage worked her way through their preliminary questions, building up a picture of what Chaffe had been up to in the time since he’d been released, and then moving onto establishing where Chaffe had been when Owers and Redmond had been killed. Chaffe claimed he had been at home over the weekend when Owers was killed and kipping in his van the night Redmond got cut open.

‘Where, Stuart?’ Savage said.

‘Some lane on Dart-fucking-Moor. Freezing my nuts off because you tossers turfed me out of my flat.’

‘We didn’t turf you out, you did a runner when we asked you about Mr Owers, remember?’

‘Same difference.’

‘Look, your van was seen near where Owers disappeared. You told us you were just in the area. Well if you’re as innocent as you say you are then why run? – and why the hell jump from the bridge? We all know Tom Daley’s a Plymouth lad but I’m not sure it’s a good idea for half the city to try and emulate his diving feats.’

‘Emulate?’ Chaffe curled his lip and looked blank.

‘It means copy. Which brings me back to Gavin Redmond. He’s killed in a manner displaying your handiwork. Face it, everything points in your direction.’

‘Good as a confession, Stuart,’ Enders said. ‘I bet your mucky prints are all over the scene.’