Death and Deception (15 page)

‘Also, what did the Braithwaites say about Sunday?’

‘Not a lot,’ replied Sally, consulting her notes. ‘Dad said she was excited and took ages to get ready. He went to the pub in the afternoon to watch the footy, admits he didn’t get back until late. Jenna went out because she and Carly had had a row over friends, so she didn’t see her sister leave. Neither of them could be clear about timings for the day.’

The door opened to admit Lizzie Singh, and, much to her embarrassment, she received a round of applause, and a wolf whistle from Gould. She stood in the doorway, having changed into her own clothes, brown eyes huge, looking a bit lost.

Dan stepped forward. ‘Lizzie, great to see you. Good job out there. I’ve spoken to Sergeant White and he’s happy for you to be seconded onto the team for the rest of the week at least. Take a seat over near Sergeant Ellis and she’ll brief you. We think your local knowledge of the area and the young people in it, will be invaluable to the investigation.’

Lizzie did as she was told, pulling up a chair next to Sally and keeping her head down until the heat faded from her face. She took out her notebook from her handbag and fumbled around her breast pocket for her pen, then remembered she was in civvies and poked about to get it out of her bag.

Dan pulled their attention back to the wall behind him. ‘It’s still early days, only two days since the murder. I know we have lost one potential suspect, but we have one in custody and soon we’ll have another one, Mr Miles Westlake. We’re just not quite there.’ He sighed.

‘The problem is that we still have no real motive for this murder except the jealousy angle. It doesn’t seem right that young Jamie May would kill the girl he professed to love. More likely that he would kill the teacher.’ Several nods and grunts confirmed his speculation. ‘Which leaves us with Miles Westlake, if we can work out how he did it. And, more importantly, when he did it.’ There was no reply this time - they all had the same information.

Dan searched their faces and risked another speculation, ‘I think we have all the players on the pitch already, ladies and gentlemen. This was no random killing. So, we’ll stop the house to house and school enquiries and
focus on the three in the frame.’ He crossed to the board and circled their names. Westlake, May and Braithwaite.

‘Yes,’ he said when Sally raised a hand, ‘we don’t write off the father yet. He’s volatile at the moment obviously, but we don’t have a clear understanding of his movements on the Sunday, and his violent outbursts may be hiding guilt as much as grief.’ He frowned, consulting his mental list and chewing his bottom lip.

‘Right. Sally, take Lizzie with you this evening and pick up Miles Westlake, bring him in under arrest for a formal. We have him for possible kidnap and assault, too. We’ll keep him in overnight.’

Sally nodded and smiled at the young officer next to her.

Dan continued, ‘Bill, the Post-Mortem report is on my desk but I haven’t got a minute. Go through it with Ben and dig out the relevant details for the wall before you go home tonight, please. Can you see if the Forensic team got any decent tyre or footprints from the scene? I’d still like to know what vehicle transported her.’ And, where it is now, he thought. ‘We’ll push back the formal interviews as far as we can tomorrow, to give us time to do a bit more sleuthing.’ He gave the team time for a snigger. ‘What? Don’t we sleuth anymore? I bet DCI Gould sleuths, don’t you?’

‘Certainly do. The old ways are the best, as I keep telling you whippersnappers. If it was good enough for Sherlock, it’s good enough for me.’ He patted his stomach and smiled round the room, enjoying the brief release of tension.

‘Jamie May is definitely going down for kidnap and assault unless Claire Quick withdraws her statement, so we can keep him here for twenty four hours anyway. Then we’ll see if we need to extend or release him on bail once we have Miles Westlake’s statement.

‘Ian, you speak to the boy’s mother and I’ll just pop into the Interview Room to see if I can get anything out of him before the solicitor arrives.’ He paused and consulted his notepad, all jobs allocated.

‘Right, that’ll do. There’s overtime in this - so don’t skimp on anything. I want thorough work and no mistakes. Let’s do an eight o’clock briefing tomorrow morning.’ He slid off the desk and made his way back to the dishwasher with his mug, signalling the end of the meeting.

As they all got to work, Dan felt in better control. At least there were no snide looks or remarks for him to pretend to ignore, and they did have a couple of suspects to interrogate.

His anxiety about the evening ahead retreated to a small nagging voice.

Date: Tuesday 25
^th
April
Time: 17
:18
Jamie May, Exeter Road Police Station

The air conditioner sucked old air from the windowless room and replaced it with older, recycled air. Even though no smoking had been allowed in the interview rooms for years, the stink of tobacco was ground into the brown streaks on the ceiling and the crumbling round burn marks in the linoleum floor.

Jamie May sat, head bowed, tracing the grooves etched into the formica table with his thumb nail. Sandra May stood outside in the corridor looking at her son through the window. A thin woman with dyed red hair and deep wrinkles, she looked like someone who had given her life to looking after her son and not spent any time or money on herself. She looked up as Dan and Ian approached, wiping her nose with a tissue.

‘He won’t see me,’ she said. ‘What’s he done? Why won’t he talk to me?’ She looked up at the men, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, appealing for answers they couldn’t give.

Dan watched Gould take Mrs May aside. The poor woman was going to be in a real state when she found out precisely what her only son had done.

He entered the interview room without notes or files. This was not a formal part of the interview. He just wanted to make contact with the boy, but didn’t intend to frighten him.

Jamie looked up through his black fringe, took in the slim, dark-haired man and looked back down at the table.

‘Jamie, I’m Detective Inspector Hellier. I’m in charge of the investigation into Carly Braithwaite’s death.’

Dan studied the side of the boy’s face. Jamie stiffened when he heard Carly’s name, but there was no other reaction. Dan picked up a chair, took it round the table and sat next to the boy, so he could at least see part of Jamie’s face.

‘How close were you to Carly, Jamie? Did you know her well?’
The boy did not look up. ‘I think you can help us to work out who may have killed her, Jamie. We know how she was killed and we have a good idea of when it happened. Can you tell me what you know about it
?
About what happened on Sunday?’

There was still no response. Dan’s instinct was to press on.

‘If you tell me the truth now, I can help you with the other charges. You know, for assaulting your teacher and keeping her against her will. They are serious charges.’ He waited for another minute. ‘Don’t you want me to help you with them?’ He was becoming angry at the lack of response, even though he could see the boy twisting one leg round the other in a mammoth effort at self-control. Dan pushed a little harder.

‘Jamie, did you actually like Carly? It’s just that it seems to me that if you were a real friend, you would want to help us to catch her killer. Carly would want you to help us, I think. We are on the same side, you know.’ He bent his head round into Jamie’s sight line and softened his expression. ‘Help me out here.’ Still nothing.

‘When did you last see Carly, Jamie? Were you with her on Sunday afternoon?’

Jamie shuffled on his chair to face away from the detective, hunching into his hoody.

Frustrated, Dan slapped the table top and raised his voice. ‘Ok, if you don’t want to talk about Carly, tell me about Miss Quick, your teacher. You must really hate her to have tied her up like that. I bet she’s a really nasty piece of work, eh? A right bitch. Was she going to tell us about what you had done, Jamie? Did you need to shut her up?’

The boy exploded out of his chair, knocking it backwards and stumbling over it towards the door. Dan leapt backwards from his own chair and threw himself in front of the door to stop the boy leaving. He was pleased to have caused some reaction, but he just might have pushed the boy too far for a first meeting. So much for not frightening him.

‘Sit down, Jamie,’ he said, ‘you’re not going anywhere, Sunshine.’

Jamie glared at the man in front of him. He swivelled around, took two steps to the one-way window and banged his head and fists on it, kicking the wall with his booted foot and yelling an incoherent stream of abuse to anyone who might be listening outside. Dan heard footsteps in the corridor and stepped away from the door. He had to admit it was a pretty impressive way to bring an interview to a close.

Gould burst in, followed by Jamie’s mother. She ran across to the boy and swept him into her arms. This time there was no resistance. Jamie let his mother hold him, and tell him how worried she had been about him, and how it would be alright now.

Gould raised his eyebrows at Dan but he just shrugged. He hadn’t found anything out and it was unlikely to be alright for Jamie May ever again. Gould ushered them both back to the table and proffered tissues.

The duty solicitor arrived in a flurry of paper work and Calvin Klein’s Obsession. As she read the charge sheet, she kept glancing up at Jamie May as though finding it difficult to equate it with the boy sobbing in his mother’s arms. She introduced herself to the Mays and to Dan, and nodded towards Gould, whom she called by his first name.

Before she got a sentence out regarding the charge, Dan jumped in.

‘We’re keeping him in, at least overnight. We haven’t charged him yet, but you can see the charges for yourself, and they are serious. The plan is to interview and charge him formally tomorrow afternoon when we have had time to verify the charges and collect witness statements.’

Vanessa Redmond bristled, and re-arranged the tortoiseshell glasses on her nose. ‘My client is barely sixteen. It is wrong to lock juveniles up and this one doesn’t look like he’s a danger to anybody at the moment. You should let him go, to be returned here tomorrow on his mother’s recognizance. He looks like he needs a good night’s sleep.’

‘And,’ Dan continued as though she had not spoken, ‘we have a badly injured witness in hospital who can tell you that he is certainly not the sweet, innocent boy you might wish him to be, so he will be staying here tonight. I’ll think about letting him go home tomorrow or Thursday, if you want to start bail proceedings after the formal interview tomorrow.’

Jamie followed the exchange, hope fading to despair on his face when he realised that he would have to spend at least one night in a cell. His mother uttered a quiet, ‘Oh, Jamie,’ and held onto his hand.

Vanessa Redmond held Dan’s eye for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod, and sniffed her displeasure.

‘I suppose that will have to do. Can you leave me alone now with my client and his mother, please?’

Both men rose and left the room. Dan posted a PC outside.

Gould glanced across at Dan as they headed back towards the main office.

‘You handled her well. She’s like a Rottweiler normally.’

‘Yeah, I spent a lot of time dealing with solicitors as a Sergeant. You have to get in first. I don’t like locking kids up either, but I’m not sure Miles Westlake will be safe if Jamie’s out and about. Plus a night in the cells might encourage him to talk to us. He’s still our number one suspect. I have to give the kid credit - he held out well against me in there.’

Gould gave a short laugh. ‘What were you saying about me not bullying witnesses?’

Much to his embarrassment, Dan felt heat around his collar rise up into his face. ‘Just shaking the tree. He knows what happened, I can feel it.’ He paused at the door to the Incident room. ‘Why don’t you go home now, Ian? Have a couple of hours break, get something to eat. I have a few things to sort out here, then I have to get Chas to agree to help us. It may take all my powers of persuasion. I’m a bit worried that I may have to arrest her to get her to co-operate.’

He smiled to show that he was joking, but he wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t smack him on the nose.

‘I thought she was a real little cracker, myself. Is she going to be so difficult? Would you prefer me to go and see her and use all my charm?’ Gould grinned, licking his lips and rubbing his belly.

‘Err… tempting offer, but no thanks all the same. I need to do this myself.’ He felt another warm flush creeping up his neck and turned to enter the office so Gould wouldn’t see. He didn’t want to admit to him what had happened the night before with Chas. He’d just laugh at the opportunity wasted and at the thought of the DI being a wimp and having ‘finer feelings’. Questions about his masculinity, never mind his ability, would be round the station before he could blink.

Gould sauntered over to his desk and Dan stood in front of the whiteboard again with a felt tip pen. He drew a red triangle to connect Carly, Miles Westlake
and Jamie May, and wrote ‘love’ along the line from Carly to Miles, and ‘jealousy’ along the line from Jamie to Miles. He wrote the same words on a similar line connecting Carly with her sister and father. Then he thought about how to connect Jed Abrams to
the main characters, but however hard he tried, he couldn’t. Abrams was a wild goose chase. Interesting in his own right, but not connected to this case. He would be happy to pass it over to Vice in the morning.

It was six thirty. The office was quietening down. Bill and Ben had added the results of the Post-Mortem to the wall before going home. Carly had definitely had sex on the Saturday night. Sally had scrawled across it – ‘with Miles Westlake’ and had drawn a line to connect up the information. Had Jamie caught them at it? He wrote the question on the wall. Jamie was struggling emotionally. He wrote that up, too. Would he even be coherent in a formal interview? They had to find a way to get him to open up and trust them. He wrote ‘Trust?’ on the board. In his heart, Dan didn’t think Jamie had killed Carly, but he thought Jamie knew who had. He sat at his desk, took out his notepad and doodled while he thought some more.