Behind Dead Eyes (37 page)

They
drove quickly and Bradshaw explained why he was breaking every speed limit along the way: ‘He could run. They do sometimes if they are fenced in. He might even have run already.'

‘Why would he run?' asked Helen. ‘He doesn't know we are on to him.'

‘Dean will have called Frank Jarvis the moment I took Callie away. Jarvis knows I've been asked to help Tom locate his daughter so I doubt he'll believe the story about the shoplifting gang, do you?'

‘I'm not convinced he'll run,' said Tom. ‘It will be the word of one respectable pillar of the local community against a teenager who has been in trouble with the police for most of her young life.'

‘There's the photograph,' Bradshaw reminded him.

‘But he doesn't know we've got that. If he knew about the photograph, wouldn't he have found it before now?'

‘Maybe.' But he still overtook the car in front of him at speed. ‘Let's not leave it to chance. The one thing I have learned is that nobody really knows for sure what anyone will do under pressure.'

Their thoughts turned to Annie Bell then, and no one contradicted Bradshaw.

They were thankful for fine weather and light traffic, which combined to make their journey to Newcastle an easy one.
Bradshaw didn't even bother to park outside Frank Jarvis's house, he simply halted the car in the middle of the road and the three of them got out. The detective banged on the door.

Frank's wife answered. ‘Is he in, Mrs Jarvis?' asked Tom.

‘No.' Her head lolled slightly as she took in each of them sluggishly.

‘Then would you mind telling us where he is?' Bradshaw didn't try to disguise his impatience with her.

She looked at Tom then. ‘Where do you think he is?'

They had to leave Bradshaw's car outside the Methodist chapel and trek on foot up to the allotments. Bradshaw had a strong premonition he wouldn't be there. He was convinced Frank Jarvis knew everything they had been doing and he'd fled, so he would never have to face them or the truth. Bradshaw was mentally preparing himself for the manhunt that would follow Frank Jarvis's disappearance, then they rounded a corner and there the man was, sitting on a bench as if all was well in the world.

‘What's this?' asked Jarvis, his suspicions immediately aroused by the presence of all three of them. Maybe Dean had not been able to get hold of the politician to warn him if he had been here for a while. No one answered, just continued to walk towards him.

Bradshaw wordlessly handed him the envelope. Jarvis looked at him expecting an explanation, but when he received none he opened it. He slid the photograph out, looked at it for a second and his eyes widened in shock. The photo fell to the floor.

‘It's all over, Frank,' Bradshaw told him. ‘We know everything.'

‘That's not me,' Jarvis managed, but the shock of seeing
himself in such a damning photograph, whose existence he clearly wasn't aware of, was affecting his ability to lie with any credibility.

‘How many of those girls have you raped over the years, Frank?' asked Tom.

‘No,' gasped Jarvis then he contradicted his claim of mistaken identity, jabbing a stubby finger at the photo: ‘That's a fake, is that.'

‘We have a credible witness who says otherwise,' Bradshaw explained as Jarvis continued his panicked denials, ‘someone who can confirm you have been going to Meadowlands and abusing those girls for a long time.'

‘Dean is a liar!' shouted Jarvis.

‘Is he?' asked Bradshaw. ‘One of my colleagues is on the way to arrest him right now. Something tells me he is likely to fold under questioning. I wouldn't want to rely on a man like Dean to back me up. He'll sell you straight down the river.'

If possible, Jarvis looked even more panicked. ‘I haven't done anything. This is blackmail! Someone is trying to ruin me! Who took this picture? Can't you see it's a fake?'

They let him ramble on then and the denials kept coming, interspersed with wild accusations. He was not a child rapist, he didn't know anything about any girls at Meadowlands, this was blackmail, someone was trying to destroy him. Every time he came out with another flustered rebuttal, Bradshaw met it with a cold, hard question. How could he explain the photograph? Why would anyone wish to destroy a man who had already stepped down? What really happened to his daughter? Who killed Diane Turner?

Tom took a step back and left the two men to argue it out. He knew Jarvis was never going to confess and they were still no closer to understanding what really happened to his
daughter. All the while Bradshaw was talking, Tom Carney remained quiet, even as Councillor Jarvis's denials grew ever more desperate.

Tom felt they were still missing something. Each time he tried to visualise Sandra's murder at the hands of her own father the whole scenario seemed to break down in his mind. There were cases of a man killing his own daughter but these were incredibly rare and always seemed to involve the father's loss of control over his offspring, where a man was unable to accept that his child was an actual person, with the freedom to make her own choices – but Frank Jarvis had made a point of instilling independence in his daughter and encouraging her to question authority. Sandra's school career, her tutorials at university, her work with damaged children all spoke of an independent young woman free from the shackles of her parents. Of course if she had confronted her father about Diane Turner and her knowledge of the photograph, it would have been a shock. Flustered by her accusations he might have snapped and … what? Murdered his own flesh and blood?

That was what Tom kept coming back to. The one, simple phrase that reverberated with him and contradicted everything else: Sandra was Frank Jarvis' flesh and blood. It was beyond dispute that not many men could bring themselves to kill their own daughter. Their first reaction would be to protect a daughter beyond all sense of personal safety. Tom was going round in circles. Jarvis had an evil secret; his daughter had discovered this and confronted him then Jarvis snapped and … once again the train of thought broke down. How could he have done it to his own flesh and blood?

That thought triggered a memory, something Tom had been puzzled by at the time so he had stored it away in a
recess of his mind. Until now, when all of a sudden it broke free and he finally understood.

He could picture her now. The mad old lady, Frank Jarvis's mother-in-law, sitting in her armchair with that sly look on her half-senile face as she told Tom, ‘That one, she's a little cuckoo.' Jarvis's wife had snapped at her to shut up. Tom had not understood her then. He thought she was questioning the sanity of her own grandchild – but no. He finally realised what she meant and the mist began to clear.

‘Oh my God,' he said aloud and because this was the first time he had spoken in a while, both men stopped and turned to listen. Tom looked Jarvis in the eye then said, ‘She's not yours.' He spoke the words quietly but they landed on Jarvis like a blow.

‘What?' asked Jarvis as if Tom had said something ridiculous, but his voice wavered and it was enough to give him away.

‘Sandra is not your daughter,' and Tom shook his head at his own foolishness, ‘even the dates add up. All this time, I thought that affair years ago was you cheating on your missus but it was the other way around, wasn't it? Sandra wasn't the happy outcome of you patching up your marriage. She wasn't born prematurely. She was the product of your wife's affair, not yours.'

‘That's a damned lie!'

‘Is it? We'll ask your wife then shall we?' and Frank Jarvis opened his mouth to protest but he couldn't think of any response. ‘That's why she drinks, isn't it? I don't mean she feels guilty because she slept with another man and had a daughter by him. That's a common enough tale. Every extended family has at least one
cuckoo
, as your mum-in-law eloquently put it. I thought she meant your daughter was mentally unstable, but what the batty old dear was really trying to say was that Sandra had been planted in the nest by someone else. So who was he, Jarvis?'

But Jarvis had run out of words all of a sudden. He shuffled towards the bench and seemed to slump into it.

‘It will be simple enough to fill in the blanks. We'll just ask your wife. I'm pretty sure she'll be very forthcoming once we tell her you're the prime suspect in her daughter's murder.'

‘Shut up!' yelled the politician and he got to his feet angrily then. ‘I did good by her! I stood by my wife when many a man wouldn't have! Christ almighty, she made me look like a fool!'

‘No, she didn't,' Tom told him, ‘but she would have if you'd kicked her out. You couldn't get a divorce back then if you wanted to succeed in politics, and you knew it. You had to keep your family together at all costs. You didn't stand by her; you convinced her to stand by you and give your marriage another shot. The price you paid was a daughter who wasn't your own.'

‘I brought that girl up! I treated her like my own daughter. I turned a blind eye to everything my wife had done.'

‘But you didn't care about that, did you, Frank? You weren't too bothered when she went elsewhere for what you couldn't give her,' and Tom shook his head. ‘What was she: seventeen or eighteen when you started walking out with her? She was already too old. You're only interested if they're very young and you enjoy it a lot more if they struggle. Christ, your wife must have been so lonely.'

‘Shut up,' hissed Jarvis.

‘All the way up here I kept on thinking,
He can't have done it. He can't have killed his own daughter
. Oh I knew what you'd done to Diane and Callie and God knows how many other girls, but I kept telling myself murdering Sandra was against nature. The truth is, you could kill another man's child when she was threatening to destroy you – and Sandra would never have seen it coming because she didn't know, did she? Did the poor girl turn her back on you, Frank? Is that what happened?'

‘Shut up,' he said again.

‘When did you kill her? During the argument up here, or was it later? We know she never left Newcastle. That was one picture that
was
a fake. When we find out which bent copper identified that girl at the railway station as your daughter and derailed a massive missing person's enquiry, he'll be arrested too. Maybe he'll have a story to tell. Perhaps he'll do a deal.'

‘What did you do with the body?' asked Tom. ‘How did you get rid of it?' And then Tom remembered something else, something someone had told him before his first meeting with Frank Jarvis. ‘She never left, did she, Frank?' He looked round the allotment. ‘That's why old Harry never saw her come down off the allotment that day. You killed her here, didn't you?'

‘Shut up!' he roared. ‘Just shut up, for God's sake!'

‘No, Frank, I won't shut up. Harry caught you out, didn't he? You didn't see him creep up here while you were digging a trench to bury Sandra. You panicked and told him it was for your potatoes but it was the wrong season. Harry thought you were a poor gardener but you were so proud of growing all your own vegetables you wouldn't have got that wrong. Was Sandra's body in the shed? Did you wrap it up in something and bury her here? I'll bet you did, and Harry will be able to tell us exactly where, won't he?'

‘I'll get a team up here now,' Bradshaw told him. ‘If you've got something to say, any mitigation you want to give before that happens, then now is the time to tell us.'

Jarvis turned slowly back to the bench and sat down.

‘Suit yourself, Jarvis,' said Bradshaw. ‘You're on your own now.'

‘Alright,' Jarvis said wearily, ‘I'll tell you. I'll tell you everything.'

Tom,
Helen and Bradshaw formed a semicircle around Jarvis.

‘Where is she?' asked Tom, and the councillor answered by pointing to a rough area of overturned soil where nothing grew but weeds.

‘What happened?' asked Bradshaw.

‘You may as well tell us,' Helen informed him, ‘we know most of it already.'

‘I was sitting here that day,' he began, ‘when Sandra marched up to me. She was angry. She said she knew about Diane Turner. I didn't even know who she meant.'

‘You never bothered to learn their names,' said Tom.

‘I didn't want to know their names,' Jarvis corrected him.

‘That made it too real.' Helen hissed the words at him angrily.

‘Sandra told me she knew all about me,' he said. ‘She called me such terrible names, used words I'd never heard her say before.'

‘And of course you denied everything,' said Tom.

‘What choice did I have?' Frank reasoned, ‘but Sandra wouldn't believe me. She said it was true and she'd get this Diane girl to tell everybody about me. She said they would put me away. I didn't think she was capable of that much hate. I tried to explain it to her. The lasses at Meadowlands are not like other girls.'

‘Bet she didn't take kindly to that,' said Tom.

‘She kept saying Diane was
innocent
.' He shook his head. ‘I told her she was a long way from innocent.'

‘Why didn't Sandra just go to the police about you?'

‘She wanted me to admit it all. Sandra told me I had to go to the police and tell them what I'd done. If I didn't, she'd produce this girl who'd tell the whole world about it. Nobody would believe a girl like that but if my own daughter was standing next to her when she said it … they'd think I was a paedophile and a rapist.' Jarvis snorted at the absurdity of that description.

‘Well, you are,' said Helen.

‘I'm not a paedophile!' he raged, ‘I've never harmed innocent children.'

‘But you raped underage teenagers,' said Tom quietly.

‘If you think I'm the first man to lie down with that Diane then you're a bloody fool. She's been with dozens of men.'

‘So that makes it alright? We know you raped her when she was fifteen. She was probably a lot younger than that when you started.'

‘Oh come on! You keep calling it rape and it's far from it. They'll sleep with you for a packet of fags!'

‘What is wrong with you?' asked Bradshaw. ‘They are just kids.'

‘I have a weakness,' admitted Jarvis, ‘that's all.'

‘A weakness for young girls?' asked Helen and he nodded.

‘Did you tell your daughter that?' asked Tom. ‘Because I'm guessing she was about as sympathetic as we are.'

‘She didn't understand,' said Jarvis. ‘She told me she would ruin me, said she was ashamed of who I was, told me I was no longer her father. I had to laugh at that one. I was never her father.'

‘And that's why you could bring yourself to kill her,' said Tom.

‘I had no choice!' roared Jarvis. ‘She left me no option!'

‘There's always a choice,' said Helen. ‘You could have let her go.'

‘You should have killed yourself,' observed Bradshaw.

‘What happened?' asked Tom.

‘She said her piece then tried to leave.' Jarvis spoke so quietly he was almost inaudible. ‘I knew I couldn't let her go. She turned her back on me so I grabbed that.' And he glanced at a large shovel that was sticking out of the ground nearby. They all stared at it. ‘And I hit her.'

‘You hit her round the head?' asked Bradshaw and Jarvis nodded. ‘And that's what killed her?' Jarvis nodded again.

‘Then you buried her out here and started the biggest cover-up you could,' observed Tom, ‘but you couldn't have done that alone. You were in the deepest shit imaginable, Frank, and you needed a powerful friend. It had to be someone who knew people, somebody who could fake sightings of a missing girl all over the city, so no one knew the last time she was alive was up here with you. He could even get a bent detective to say he'd found Sandra on CCTV at the railway station. Most of all, you needed someone who could find Diane Turner and make her disappear.'

‘I didn't know what to do …' he protested.

‘What else could you do,' asked Tom, ‘except go and see someone you've known all your life who didn't mind doing your dirty work: Jimmy McCree?'

‘There wasn't anyone else who could …'

‘Tidy up your mess?' asked Bradshaw.

‘Where did he find Diane?' asked Tom.

‘That bit was easy,' said Jarvis. ‘She was in my daughter's room at her lodgings in Durham. There was nobody else there because it was reading week.'

‘So she was on her own when they took her,' said Helen, ‘poor thing.'

‘She didn't stand a chance,' said Tom, ‘did she?'

‘I didn't know they were going to …'

‘Kill her?' asked Helen angrily. ‘What did you think they would do?'

‘I don't know,' said Jarvis. ‘I just wanted all this to go away.'

‘You did know,' said Bradshaw. ‘As long as Diane was alive she'd be a walking, talking threat to you and a link to Sandra. When you got Jimmy McCree involved you knew there was only one possible outcome.'

‘Did you pay him?' asked Tom and Jarvis shook his head. ‘No, you didn't have to. You just stepped down as head of the council and walked away from the planning committee and the Riverside tender. Then you backed Joe Lynch as your successor, because he was already on McCree's payroll. That's how McCree managed to get in with Alan Camfield. He brought the leader of the city council with him. You stepping down was the price you paid for cleaning up your mess, wasn't it?'

‘He made me do that. I had no choice.'

‘So the city got saddled with Joe Lynch.'

‘That's not my fault. McCree insisted on it. Joe Lynch is the corrupt one and I tried to expose him.'

‘You haven't said a word against him since he became leader of the council,' said Helen.

Jarvis looked at Helen as if she was simple. ‘Who do you think has been sending you your tip-offs on Lynch?' A chill went through Helen because she knew she'd been played then. ‘I love this city and Lynch isn't worthy of it, so I helped you with your articles and they have done him some real damage.'

‘Lynch might be a bad man,' Bradshaw told him, ‘but as far as I know he never asked Jimmy McCree to kill a young girl.'

Jarvis shook his head. ‘We never had that conversation. He said he would make sure the girl never said a word against me. I thought he might pay her off or …'

‘You knew he would never do that,' said Bradshaw.

‘What about the photograph?' asked Tom. ‘Didn't you try to get it?'

‘I didn't know anything about it. I never knew there was a photograph.'

‘Sandra must have been keeping that up her sleeve in case you wouldn't admit everything. McCree had Diane Turner killed before she could tell anyone about the photograph,' Tom said, ‘but someone must have found out who her best friend was so he could arrange those fake postcards to be sent to Callie from London and nobody suspected she was dead.'

‘Then you started the campaign to find your daughter,' said Tom. ‘I have to hand it to you, Frank – of all the cynical, soulless, ice-hearted exercises I have ever come across, this one takes the absolute prize.'

‘I …' he began.

‘If you tell us you had no choice one more time, so help me …' And Tom balled his fist in readiness.

Jarvis shook his head. ‘Don't you see, I only did what I would have done if Sandra really had disappeared. That's all.'

‘To alleviate suspicion?' asked Bradshaw.

‘If I had sat back and done nothing, everyone would have wondered why. I had to quit because McCree made me but this campaign was the excuse I needed to step down from the leadership.'

‘So nobody suspected you'd been got at,' said Helen, ‘and no one assumed you'd killed your own daughter.'

‘Killing one girl in a fit of high emotion is a terrible thing,' Bradshaw told him. ‘You'll get life for that but it might not
mean life,' he told the councillor and Tom was immediately back in the world of Richard Bell and his tariff. ‘The other girl, however.'

‘But that wasn't me,' protested Jarvis, ‘that was McCree.'

‘Only because you begged him,' said Bradshaw. ‘The leader of the council in his back pocket? It must have been like Christmas for Big Jimmy. He won't be so happy once he hears you've been arrested for murder though Frank, because he'll know the only chance you have left is to make a deal.'

‘A deal?' Helen was shocked. ‘He doesn't get any deals.' She jabbed a finger at the distraught councillor. ‘He's a bloody murderer!'

‘And so is Jimmy McCree,' Bradshaw told her, ‘and I want them both.'

Jarvis seemed to snap back into reality at the mention of McCree's wrath. ‘I want a lawyer. I'm saying nothing more.'

‘You'll get one,' Bradshaw told him. ‘They'll be queueing up for a high-profile case like this one.' He turned to Helen and Tom. ‘I think we're done here. I'll call this in,' he glanced at Sandra Jarvis's burial site, ‘and get a team out here.'

‘Read him his rights,' Tom told Bradshaw, ‘then bring him down the hill.' And with that, Tom turned and started to walk down the hill himself.

‘Where are you going?' asked Helen.

Tom turned back to face them. ‘Me? I'm going on ahead so I can knock on every door. I'm going to tell everyone to come out and watch Frank Jarvis being led away in handcuffs.'

‘Don't,' pleaded Jarvis, ‘please. I'm begging you.'

‘Fuck you,' Tom told him and he carried on walking.

Frank Jarvis looked completely destroyed at that moment, so Helen told him, ‘You deserve this.'