Bright Spark (43 page)

       “You
was just in the wrong place, an’ all,” he offered, matter of fact, finally
acknowledging the blows he’d traded with Slowey those few long weeks ago. “Your
own fault though. You had no business there. Sorry an’ all that shite, but you
gave me a few good digs an’ I had to give a few back.”

       Slowey
found himself tired to the point of indifference, having scraped into the heart
of this canker in search of resolution or revelation and finding only callousness
and banality. He needed to remember the point of the process; to unspool the
rope he’d need to hang this ordinary monster. Would he feel differently if the
literal truth of a tarred noose and a long drop awaited this youth at the end
of the judicial merry-go-round?

       “Fuckin’
stupid to keep it.” Braxton had seen only polite but expectant silence in
Slowey’s demeanour. “The video box thing. He told me to burn it or drown it.
Said it could cost him. That’s why I kept it. Needed something over him. Didn’t
even know what were on it. Didn’t know if it worked.”

       “Oh,
it works, Kevin, don’t worry about that,” said Harkness, momentarily breaking
his silence. He’d yet to hear from the technicians but that was scarcely the
point.

       “So,
Kevin, let’s sum up.” Slowey stacked the growing collection of interview tapes,
glanced at his watch and smoothed down a new page with an air of finality.

“You’ve
told us about your relationship with Kelly. You’ve told us about your dad’s
business and your humble role in it. You’ve told us about your shenanigans in
and around the Friars’ Vaults public house. You’ve told us about your
contretemps with Nigel Firth. Have you missed anything? Have I?”

       Braxton
shrugged and shook his head. Slowey pointed at the tape recorder with an even
smile.

       “Erm,
no. No, ain’t nothing else.”

       “And
you agreed right at the start, Kevin, that this would be your chance to
unburden yourself, make a new start and stop
hiding
?”

       “Erm,
yes.”

       “Great.
Well, Kevin, while we’re summing up, I should apologise.”

       Braxton
sweated and twitched in the silence that Slowey had allowed to fill the cramped
chamber.

       “I’m
sorry that I got you all wrong. I thought you had courage. I thought you could
stop
hiding
and tell it all straight
like a man
. I thought you
could be
better than your old man.
I thought I’d be sitting here
preparing a submission to the judge, explaining how misunderstood you were, how
tough your life has been, how you had little choice in some of the things you
did, how you lived in fear of violence and were forced to defend yourself. I’ve
even got this form for offences to be taken into consideration, to get you a
bit of a discount at sentencing time.”

       “Yeah,
well, let’s do that, still.”

       “I may
as well tear this up now.”

       “No,
don’t, you don’t have to….”

       “You
see, Kevin, you haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know.” He tore the
blank form in two and let its pieces drop to the floor, gratified to see
Braxton almost reaching out for them. “I know you’re a player. A proper
hard-man. But you’re only telling me about the juvenile stuff. A bit of
drug-running. A bit of underage sex. A bit of ABH. Pieces of other people’s
conversations. I think I’ve
overestimated…..”

      
“I’m a killer! A stone killer! Look in
my eyes. I’ll rip your heart out. Smash your brains out.” Braxton rocked and
slavered, laughed and cried, clutching at his hair with one hand while the
other gripped the seat of the chair as if it were bucking beneath him.

       “Kevin!”
shouted Harkness, propping himself on his elbows, sensing that Slowey was about
to suspend the interview and unwilling to let Braxton retreat into mania. “Why
did you set fire to Murphy’s house at Marne Close?”

       “I’m a
killer, you pricks, I am the daddy!”

       “Did
your father tell you to do it?”

       “He
told me but he don’t tell me nothin’ no more.”

       “Kevin,
focus.” Harkness pounded the table with a fist. “Did your father tell you to
set fire to 13 Marne Close? Say it!”

       “He
told me…..always telling me….”

       “Did
you set fire to 13 Marne Close?”

       “I’m a
killer. That’s what I am. That’s what I do…”

       “Did
you set fire to 13 Marne Close?”

       “At
Kelly’s,” Braxton muttered, rocking and smirking. “At Kelly’s trying to get
shagged….”

       “We’ve
got your phone. We’ve got her phone. We’ve got her statement.” Harkness thrust
a pile of documents towards Braxton and stared into his rolling eyes. “You
didn’t go there. You didn’t call her. You went to 13 Marne Close, poured petrol
through the letterbox and set a fire. You killed two innocent children.”

       “No.
No, no, no!”

       “Don’t
you look at the floor, Kevin, look at me!”

Harkness
flicked open a document folder, riffled through it noisily, drew out a handful
of colour images of the post mortem and spread them in front of Braxton. He
stood, looming over Braxton, one hand on the back of his chair, fighting the
temptation to seize him by the scruff of his neck and drive his face into the
images, into the reality of the deed, the life and hope reduced to charred bronchi,
splayed ribs and unpacked viscera. 

“Get
an eyeful of that, Kevin. You brave enough for that? You man enough?” 

       “Not
me.”

       “You
admit this now, or this and this and this,” Harkness said, jabbing a finger at
different images of the Murphy children dismembered on the mortuary slab, “will
be with you forever. I’ll see to it. No amount of rubbing will get these
pictures out of your eyes.”

       “Not
me. Not me.”

       “Either
you admit that your old man told you to do it, to burn Murphy’s house, or it’s
all getting hung around your neck. Come on, Kevin. Choose!”

       “No.
Not me.”

       “Could
be you didn’t think about what would happen after you lit that rag. Could be
you were too scared of the old man to say no. If you just keep lying to me, I
can’t help you.”

       “Stop.”
Braxton’s spine seemed to buckle as he wedged his fists between his knees and
intoned the invocation he hoped would crack open the earth and see him dragged
straight to the hell he deserved without all this noise and fuss. “He told me
to do it. He told me to do all of it. It were all him. He told me to do it”

       “Come
on then. Why did you do it?” Harkness leaned against the wall of the cycle shed
behind the cell block and passed the lit cigarette back to Slowey.

       “You
know why,” said Slowey, shouting over the flailing of summer rain on the iron
roof over their heads and contemplating the ‘no smoking’ sign on the rear of
the rusting diesel pump a few feet away.

       “I
don’t. Tell me.”

       “Or
what? Will you show me some snuff pictures? Try to intimidate me with your big
orang-utan arms?” Slowey swallowed the rest of his diatribe and stared at his
shoelaces.  “I turned the tape off because the interview was over.”

       “I had
him talking. I had him confessing.”

       “You
had him gibbering. I had a plan.”

       “Which
had gone as far as it could.”

       “So
you hijacked my interview.” Slowey stifled a cough, felt the world wobble on
its axis as the nicotine hit his bloodstream and knew he’d never be a
fully-fledged smoker. He couldn’t really hold his drink either; perhaps he just
wasn’t cut out for CID. He handed back the cigarette.

       “Don’t
get territorial, Ken.” Harkness accepted the smoke with an unthinking gesture
of thanks.

       “I was
right on the line with that kid and you just crashed right over it. Do you know
what you got from him? No, shut up, I’ll tell you. You had a vague confession
obtained by coercion. That’s how it will play out. It won’t get past the
prosecutor, never mind the court.”

       “Ken,
we got him. We got the cough. Christ, man, we solved this. We’ll iron out the
wrinkles later.”

       “Then
why aren’t you doing cartwheels through the office?”

       Harkness
shrugged and stamped the fire out of the half-finished cigarette.

       “Boss
wants to see us.”

       “I’ll
bet he does. So, go on then. What’s wrong with the confession that I supposedly
cut short?”

       “Don’t
get smug, Ken. You win, copper! You’ve got me bang to rights. I wanted this to
be over so badly. I wanted to have a face and a name I could blame. I wanted
the result so I fed him the answer I wanted to hear. Now I don’t know whether
he’s behind it or not. And you haven’t called me ‘Sarge’ for minutes.”

       “He’s
going down for murder one way or another.
Sarge.
  Hold on to that. But
we’ve got to finish this interview. Try to recover something.”

       “I’ll
let you lead this time.”  Harkness swiped the electronic key-card against the
back door’s access pad.

       “Yes,
you will,” replied Slowey, shouldering Harkness aside to move out of the
pelting rain.

Zoe
Stewart had framed her thinking space with glass, open space and darkness. The
expensively built conservatory abutted the drawing room of what had once been a
village rectory and looked out over gently rippling wheat fields during the day
and unlit absence at night. Once she had brewed a large cafetiere, closed the
connecting doors behind her and curled her legs underneath her, she could give
her work the concentration it deserved without the white noise of office life
or the inane banter of home life to distract her.

Having
been nominated to handle the abortive case against the late Nigel Firth, it had
been deemed logical that she should inherit the case against a new suspect in
the same messy imbroglio. More importantly, the bundle of papers gleamed with
the possibility of a solid and illustrious prosecution, once the scurf of
unprovable allegations had been chiselled away. It could carry her one more
rung up the ladder.

So
with her laptop humming, her red and black pens lined up correctly and her bare
feet outstretched on the wicker lounger, she set aside the plastic sleeves
containing DVDs and photographic prints and delved into the thick wedge of the
case summary. Kevin Braxton still languished in custody, an early decision was
needed and she couldn’t rest until she’d unpicked this new conundrum.

Two
hours of reading, annotating, scribbling, cross-referring and re-reading had
acquainted her with the case and given her the beginnings of a decision. She
made another pot of coffee and spent the deathly hours between midnight and
three a.m. inspecting photographs, reading forensic paperwork and reviewing the
DVD of the suspect interview on her laptop.

Afterwards,
she flipped the machine’s lid shut, listened to the hot fuss of its cooling
fans fading and stepped into the garden to taste cooler and cleaner air.
Yesterday’s moisture had seeped from the earth and coalesced into ground mist,
muffling and obscuring everything. Somewhere far above, the drone of a
high-flying aircraft throbbed and ebbed away, like a once clear thought
slipping from her mind.  She lingered, trying to discern the fidgeting life of
small mammals in the shrubs and hedgerows, but only hearing the shriek of an
owl, somewhere nearby, watching and evaluating, staking a claim on its killing
ground.  She smiled to herself; she could be persuaded that at least one lone,
merciless killer still quartered the land, even if that prospect need only
alarm voles and dormice.

She
shivered, returned to the warmth of the laptop and began to sketch out her
analysis. On paper, Braxton’s murder of his father couldn’t have been more
clear-cut. He’d been very nearly caught in the act, the forensic evidence would
almost certainly marry up and he’d repeatedly, indeed proudly, confessed to it
without bidding. He’d left himself scope for a defence of provocation – a
sudden and involuntary loss of control based on long-term psychological or
physical abuse – and the detectives hadn’t managed to seal off that bolthole;
but that wasn’t greatly troubling and she could live with a conviction for
manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility if it gave her a quick
result.

Several
other noteworthy offences were equally clear, with or without the interview. Seen
through the prism of that torrid interview however, matters quickly lost their
clear focus. Constable Slowey had plainly provoked an agitated suspect into a
state of crisis, the better to pacify and exploit him on his own terms.

Still,
the process might have escaped taint until the hulking Sergeant Harkness lost
his composure and practically cudgelled Braxton into confessing to setting the
lethal fire at 13 Marne Close, presumably in reprisal for Murphy’s reneging on
a drugs debt. Even taken in isolation, Braxton’s confession to Harkness was
weak and ambiguous; monosyllabic, affirmatory answers to leading questions,
without any corroborative narrative of his own.

Had
Slowey allowed it to continue and if Harkness had composed himself, they might
have salvaged the confession. As it was, the fact that Slowey himself had seen
the need to intervene could tend to confirm that the whole process was tainted
in the eyes of the court. 

A
calmer interview session had ensued an hour later and lasted into the late
afternoon. Whatever spell Slowey had cast had been dispelled. Braxton confessed
in clear and businesslike terms to the murder of his father then answered ‘no
comment’ to every other question, spending the entire session staring into the
camera and, unknowingly, into the tired eyes of Zoe Stewart. 

Braxton
did not therefore elaborate on his confession to the arson at 13 Marne Close
and shed no light on Murphy’s fall from the bridge over the bypass. Nor would
he comment on the drugs stash he’d inherited in the hostile corporate takeover
he’d effected with a spade.

In
conference with Brennan after Firth’s spectacular demise, she had tacitly
supported the notion that the case be put before the Coroner and dispensed
with. The obvious culprits for the fire, Firth and Murphy, had neatly put
themselves beyond prosecution. The evidence, circumstantially and forensically,
suggested a highly personal motive rather than a random act of murderous
lunacy.

Nevertheless,
Murphy seemed by far the least likely suspect of the two. After all, why would
he attack his own home from the outside and then dispatch himself elsewhere in
such a haphazard manner? A rational view might not afford the greatest insight
into the irrational mind, but she’d have been far happier had either one of the
men been forensically linked to the fire. Perhaps a line had to be drawn.

The
police had wishfully linked every sordid act into one coherent story, as if the
force of that story’s logic all by itself could prove that Kevin Braxton killed
Murphy and his family. Corrupt and unhinged as Murphy had been at the time of
his death, he just might have been on the verge of a breakdown and capable of
killing his family and then himself.

The
evidence strongly supported the view that he fell from the bridge by his own
hand; the bridge didn’t lie on his route home from the pub and the evidence of
his last telephone call, equivocal as it was, suggested idiocy more than foul
play.

She
must clarify the issues, and promptly, she resolved as the time display on her
laptop registered four a.m. Patricide, burglary, unlawful intercourse and
police assault had been well evidenced and should be charged and put before the
court promptly. Drugs and other charges might follow subject to searches and
forensic work still underway.

As
for the other murders, she was not about to launch a prosecution based on
tenuous and dubiously obtained evidence purely because of one officer’s signal
and desperate need to find closure for three terrible deaths he could not have
foreseen, and one terrible death he could have prevented.

He
wouldn’t like it but he really must learn to take his medicine.

Sharon
dared to glance at her reflection in the kitchen mirror and reproached herself
for her decisions that morning. Black eye-liner, dark lip gloss, tightly
tied-back hair and fitted, charcoal-grey business suit set the right note of
severity for the workplace; but in her mother’s kitchen, on this grim day, a
day she’d known would come soon but couldn’t acknowledge, she looked and felt
like an undertaker’s assistant.  

       Mother
busied herself in the front room, fussing and bustling, partly because bags
needed to be packed, medication administered and corners smoothed down, but
mostly because inactivity led to thought and thought wondered into tar pits of
misery. The private ambulance would be threading its way through unknowing and
uncaring city streets, its mission as plodding and inevitable as any other
delivery service. It would carry her dying father away on a cushion of diesel
fumes and practised compassion to the hospice, his place of dying. He’d be
carried out of the house barely alive and hoisted into a shared, open coffin
disguised as a mini-bus.

       She
banished the thoughts, knowing them as morbid and unhelpful. Perhaps Harkness’s
bleak view of the world had infected her. She’d visited the hospice with her
mother and had been impressed by its staff and its setting. Barely three miles
from home and well removed from the A57 trunk road by its own long, narrow access
road, the complex sat on the banks of the Witham with only meadow-grass, the
open sky, the still water and the odd canal boat for company.

A
former angler, dad would relish the setting. Besides, he’d been fighting his
own body for decades and had long accepted that he couldn’t evade death
forever. A week earlier, while mother had been uncharacteristically confined
with a migraine, he had confided in Sharon his need for solitude near the end,
to find peace for himself and his family. He didn’t want the family home to be
tainted by his terminal ordeal, nor did he want his choices to be trampled down
by mother’s solicitude.

       Sharon had expected to be called upon to cajole and browbeat her mother, but instead the
decision had been made quickly and presented to her as a fait accompli. Her
mother wouldn’t have acquiesced quickly; it was, after all, her life’s mission
to care for her father. Yet perhaps even she hadn’t had the stomach to thwart a
dying man’s wishes on any grounds.

       Still,
Sharon had felt compelled to be there when her father left the bricks and
mortar he’d devoted most of his life to and passed into the limbo of palliative
care; the river on whose banks the hospice stood might as well have been the
Styx, its manager the boatman with his hand held open for his fee. She would
offer moral support, if dad needed it or mum would accept it, and ensure that
he actually left as he’d intended. Rory had instructed her to take as much time
out of the office as she needed; she actually needed to be back by noon for a
conference with counsel and for her emotional health. Mother, she was pleased
to see, had paid for JJ to spend the day with his carer as he would not respond
quietly to this permanent upheaval.

       “No
sign yet, dear,” said Marjorie, easing the connecting door closed behind her.  Sharon took half a second to recognise her. She’d replaced her cut-price spectacles with
contact lenses that rarely came out of their cases, styled her hair, applied a
judicious amount of foundation and blusher, and dug out an ageing but
distinguished trouser suit which, remarkably, fitted and flattered. Most
strikingly of all, she stood tall, her habitual stoop un-kinked.

       “Mum.
You look fantastic. What happened?”

       “I do
know how to dress, dear.”

       “I’m
sorry. I just mean you look really good. You should dress up a bit more often,
not just on special..….  I’ll just shut up. How’s dad doing?”

       “He’s
resting.” Dad ‘resting’ meant that mum didn’t want him disturbed, regardless of
what he was actually doing. Decades earlier, ‘he’s resting’ could have meant
anything from ‘he’s sleeping off his Saturday hangover’ to ‘we’ve argued and
he’s sulking with his fishing flies in the garden shed.’

       “I
think I’ll have a chat with him, before I rush off back to the office.”

       “Have
you seen yesterday’s newspaper, dear?”

       “No.
Why?”

       “Oh,
but you must. It’s very exciting.”

Marjorie
glided into the room, took the local newspaper from the windowsill, sat at the
kitchen table and waited. Taking the hint, Sharon did likewise, remarking that
she hadn’t seen her mother smiling this freely for longer than she could
remember.  

       “Listen
to this,” Marjorie said, turning to page three. “‘Kevin Braxton, 18 years,
appeared before magistrates today charged with the murder of Lincoln man Keith
Braxton. Kevin Braxton was arrested following the discovery by police of his
father’s body at an allotment in the north of the city on Wednesday morning. The
youth has also been charged with burglary, sexual assault and a number of minor
offences. He spoke only to confirm his name and was remanded in custody to
Lincoln Crown Court later this week’.

       “Now
this is the really exciting bit, darling,” continued Marjorie in the manner of
Moses reciting graven wisdom. “‘A police spokesman refused to confirm or deny
reports that Kevin Braxton had been linked to the horrifying murder of the
family of prison officer Dale Murphy, or that Murphy and Keith Braxton had been
implicated in the supply of controlled substances to inmates at HMP Lincoln.

“‘Suzanne
Murphy and the couple’s two children were killed in the early hours of 3
^rd
August when an unknown arsonist used petrol to set a blaze at their
semi-detached home on Marne Close in the Ermine area of the city. Dale Murphy
was subsequently found dead below the Burton Road bridge over the A46 city
bypass. While his death appears accidental, the police have yet to rule out
foul play.’ Don’t you see, dear?”

       “See
what, mum?”

Marjorie
appeared jubilant, while Sharon chewed her lip, processing. Harkness had given
her hints, confided his weaknesses and errors, but he’d said nothing to prepare
her for this. To the police, Firth had become an embarrassment. To Harkness,
he’d become another sin to atone for. To Sharon, he’d remained an acid test of
her judgement, a test that she was determined to believe she had passed.