Cold Killing: A Novel (14 page)

Hellier put a hand on Templeman’s forearm. Templeman fell silent. “I want to answer their questions. Any questions. I didn’t go to his flat that night.”

“So why did you lie about never having been to Daniel’s flat? You knew this was a murder investigation. You must have known the serious consequences of lying to us. You’re not a stupid man.”

Hellier looked at the floor and spoke. “Shame, Inspector. I don’t expect you to understand. I only wish you could.”

Sean had had about all he could stomach. Most of his childhood he’d felt nothing but shame. Shame and fear. Listening to Hellier’s false pleadings made him feel physically sick.

“You live a lie. You lie to your wife, kids, family, friends. You pay young men to have sex with you and then curl up in bed with your wife. You lie to the police, even though you know that may delay our investigation. And now you want me to believe you lied because you were ashamed of your sexual preferences. I doubt you’ve ever been ashamed of anything in your entire life.”

Hellier looked up from the floor. His eyes were glassy. “You’re wrong, Inspector. I am ashamed. Ashamed of it all. I’m ashamed of my life.”

Sean studied him for a few seconds, looking deep into the darkness that he knew seethed behind Hellier’s eyes. “So what was so special about Daniel?” He wanted to keep it personal. “Why keep going back to the same boy?” He used the word “boy” deliberately.

“I have needs. Daniel helped me with those needs.”

“Enlighten me.”

“I practice sadomasochistic sex. So did Daniel. I went to him for that. I generally saw him once every two to three weeks. That’s what I was trying to hide. I was a fool, I know.”

“What did this practice involve?” Sean asked.

“That’s hardly relevant,” Templeman interjected.

“There are unexplained marks on the victim’s body. Mr. Hellier’s sexual behavior may explain those marks. It’s relevant.”

“Nothing too shocking,” Hellier answered. “I would tie him up, by the wrists usually. With rope. We used blindfolds, sometimes whips. Mainly it was role playing. Harmless, but not something I wanted the world to know about.”

“I can understand that,” Donnelly said.

“Did he ever tie you up?” Sean asked.

“No. Never.”

“So when you say sadomasochistic, you filled the sadist’s role, yes?”

“Not always. Daniel would beat me sometimes, but I never felt comfortable being in bondage. Daniel said I lacked confidence. He was probably right.”

Hellier had an answer for everything. Sean dropped the address book on the table. It was still in the plastic evidence bag. “What’s this?” he asked.

“An address book,” Hellier answered. “Obviously.”

“It was pretty well hidden for an address book. No names either, just initials and numbers.”

“It contains certain contacts of mine I would rather my wife and family didn’t know about.” It was an answer that made sense. Like all his answers.

“Is Daniel’s number in here?” Sean asked.

Hellier hesitated. Sean noticed it. “No.”

Why would that be? Sean wondered. Here was his secret book, yet one of his biggest secrets wasn’t in it. That made no sense. “You sure his number’s not in here?”

“Yes,” Hellier said. “His number’s not in there.”

Sean decided to let it go for now, until he understood more. “And the cash: I believe it was about fifty thousand in mixed currency, mainly U.S. dollars?”

“I like to keep a decent amount of cash about. These are uncertain times we live in, Inspector.”

“And the money spread across the world in various bank accounts belonging to you? Hundreds of thousands, from what we can see.” Sean knew these questions would get him no further, but they had to be asked.

“One thing I won’t do, Inspector, is apologize for my wealth. I work hard and I’m well rewarded. Everything I have, I earned. My accounts are in order. I can show you where the money came from and the Inland Revenue can unfortunately vouch for the fact that I’m telling the truth.”

Sean was getting nowhere and he knew it. He needed to knock Hellier off his stride—get personal and see how Hellier reacted. “Inland Revenue, your account, your job at Butler and Mason—it’s all very top end, isn’t it?” He noticed a small, involuntary contraction of Hellier’s pupils that disappeared as quickly as it had come. “And you, in your thousand-pound suits and three-hundred-pound shoes—you’re a polished act, James, I’ll give you that.”

“I don’t know where you’re going with this,” Templeman interrupted. “It hardly seems relevant or proper.”

Sean ignored him. “But underneath that veneer of yours, there’s an angry man, isn’t there, James? So what is it that’s really pissing you off? Come on, James, what is it? What are you trying to hide? A working-class background? Maybe an illegitimate child somewhere? Or did you disgrace yourself in some previous job—got caught with your hand in the cookie jar—everything was smoothed over, but still you were shown the door? Come on, James—what is it you’re hiding from me—from everyone?”

Hellier just stared straight into him, his eyes never blinking, lips sealed tightly shut, possibly the faintest trace of a smirk on his face as his muscles tensed, controlling his facial reactions, making him impossible to read.

“You know, James,” Sean continued, “you can have it all—the job, the money, the wife and kids, the Georgian house in Islington—but you’ll never really be like them. You’ll never be accepted as one of them, not really. You’ll never be like . . . like Sebastian Gibran, and you know it.” Another contraction of Hellier’s pupils told Sean he’d hit a raw nerve. “You can try and look like him, even sound like him, but you’ll never
be
like him. He was born into that role. He’s the genuine article, while you’re a fake—a cheap imitation—and you can’t stand it, can you?”

He leaned back, but still Hellier wouldn’t break, sitting silently, his hands resting on the table, one on top of the other, seemingly unmoved.

Sean tapped a pen on the table. He had one other question he was burning to ask, something that just didn’t make sense about the fingerprint they’d found, but some instinct warned him that it wasn’t the right time yet. Like a champion poker player knowing when to slap his ace down and when to hold back, a voice screamed in his head to save the question until he himself understood its significance.

“We’ll have to check on what you’ve said, so unless you’ve anything to add, then this interview is concluded.”

“No. I have nothing to add.”

“In that case, the time is seven fifty-eight and this interview is concluded.” Donnelly clicked the tape recorder off.

“Now what?” Templeman asked.

“No doubt you’d like another private consultation with your client, and then he’ll be returned to his cell while we decide what’s going to happen to him.”

“There’s no reason to keep Mr. Hellier in custody any longer. He’s answered all of your questions and should be released immediately. Without charge, I should add.”

“I don’t think so,” Sean said, dismissing him.

Templeman was still protesting vigorously as Sean and Donnelly left the interview room. A uniformed police constable guarded the door. Sean and Donnelly headed back to their murder inquiry office.

Sean felt deflated. The interview hadn’t gone well. Except for one thing. Why wasn’t Daniel’s name in Hellier’s secret book? That made no sense. Somehow and in some way it was another piece of the puzzle.

CHAPTER 13

S
ally quickly studied the man who opened the front door of the detached Surbiton house. He looked about fifty years old, five-nine. His slim arms and legs, combined with a beer belly, reminded her of a spider. His hair was thick and sandy colored, his eyes green and sharp. Sally saw an intelligence and a confidence behind them. She reckoned that Paul Jarratt had been a good detective during his years as a Metropolitan Police officer.

“Mr. Jarratt?” Sally held out a hand. Jarratt accepted it. “DS Sally Jones. Sorry to call unannounced like this, but I was in the neighborhood and wondered if you wouldn’t mind helping me out with a case I’m working on.”

“A case?” Jarratt was surprised.

“A murder, actually,” Sally told him. “A few years ago you dealt with a case involving a man who could be a suspect for our murder.”

“You’d better come in then,” said Jarratt.

She entered the tidy house and followed Jarratt to a large, comfortable kitchen. “Tea? Coffee? Or something cold?” he offered.

“Tea would be good. Milk and one please.”

“I’ll make a pot,” Jarratt said, smiling, flicking the kettle on and gathering the things he needed to make the tea.

“So how long’ve you been out for?” she asked. Half the force dreamed of being out. The other half dreaded it. Which was Jarratt?

“About four years now. Ill health. An old back injury finally caught up with me five years short of my thirty. I qualified for a full pension and some medical benefits, so I’m not complaining. I get a bit bored at times, but you know . . . Anyway, what can I help you with?”

Sally recognized the cue to get down to business. “I’m investigating a murder. A bad one. Young gay man, Daniel Graydon, stabbed and beaten to death.”

“A homophobic attack?” Jarratt asked.

“No, we don’t think so. Something else, although we’re not quite certain what. Which is where you may be able to help.”

“Well, I’m not sure about that,” Jarratt answered. “I spent most of my time on the Fraud Squad. Number crunching was my game. Not murders.”

“I appreciate that, but other than working on the Fraud Squad you also did a spell in the CID office at Richmond.” It sounded like a question, but it wasn’t.

“Yes. That’s right. From about ninety-five till about ninety-eight, as best as I can remember. Then I got back on the Fraud Squad.”

“It was a case you dealt with at Richmond that interests me—a man called Stefan Korsakov, back in ninety-six. He’d been arrested by Parks Police for—”

“Raping a young boy,” Jarratt interrupted. “He bound and gagged him in Richmond Park. Threatened him with a stiletto knife, then raped him. I shouldn’t think I’ll ever forget Stefan Korsakov. And if you’d met him, you wouldn’t either.”

There was silence in the kitchen. The comment was unusual. Police officers never exaggerated the impact criminals had on them. Sally wondered what it could have been about Korsakov that had Jarratt so spooked. She tried hard to think when a suspect had ever affected her in that way. Nothing came to mind. She sensed that Jarratt’s fear of Korsakov was personal.

“What made him so memorable?” she asked.

Jarratt poured two cups of tea, adding the milk and sugar to the one that he placed in front of Sally before answering her question. “No remorse. Absolutely none. His only regret was that he got caught. And that only bothered him because it meant he was off the street and wouldn’t be able to do the same thing again to someone else.

“He never said so during the interview—in fact, he never said anything during the interview—but I knew he would have killed that young lad if he hadn’t been disturbed. There’s no doubt. It was a hell of a blow when the boy’s family wouldn’t let us prosecute him for the rape. I can still remember the smirk on Korsakov’s face when I told him the charge had been dropped. Talk about the devil looking after his own. It would have been better for everyone if he’d taken a long fall from a high window. Know what I mean?”

Sally smiled uncomfortably, but didn’t answer. Jarratt sensed her reaction. He stood and moved to the sink, pouring his tea away as Sally watched him and tried to sense his emotions. Jarratt’s nausea looked real enough.

“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what it feels like to watch an animal like Korsakov walk away, knowing it’s only a matter of time before he rapes again, or graduates to murder.”

“But he didn’t walk,” Sally reminded him, “he went down for the fraud. I hear you made certain of it.” It was a compliment.

“Yes, I made certain he went down for something. I got a sniff of Korsakov’s little fraud operation and dug in. He went down, all right, but it was a hollow victory. He got four years. That was all. All those people he screwed. And we never recovered the money. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t find it.

“I even had a couple of old friends from the Serious Fraud Squad in the city who owed me a favor help me look for it, but nothing. He was a clever bastard. I’ll give him that.”

Sally was interested in the fraud. It helped build the picture of Korsakov. But she was more interested in his violent nature. That was the road that could lead to his capture.

“Did he show an awareness of forensic evidence or police procedures?” Sally asked.

“Definitely,” came the unhesitating reply. “The clothes he wore, the use of a condom, the victim he picked, and even the venue was pretty good. He just got unlucky, and thank God he did.

“And he would have learned. He would have gotten better and better. He was clever enough to learn from his own mistakes. Very organized too. His frauds were brilliantly simple. And as I’ve already mentioned, clever enough to hide the cash where no one could find it.

“That’s not easy to do these days,” Jarratt continued. “Billionaire drug dealers, bent City accountants, corrupt governments—they all spend fortunes trying to hide the money in the legitimate banking system. You can’t keep millions of pounds under the mattress and, even if you could, no one accepts cash anymore, not for major purchases. Cash makes people nervous. You’ve got to get it into the banking system. That’s where we so often catch them out and recover the money, but not with Korsakov. He was too cunning.

“So tell me, DS Jones. He’s committed another rape or murder, hasn’t he?”

Sally hesitated before answering. She was unsure why. “We don’t know if it’s Korsakov. There are similarities between your case and one we’re investigating. So we’re doing a little background digging. One thing’s bothering me though.”

Jarratt looked at her, expressionless. “Go on.”

“Everything points to Korsakov being a repeat offender. You said it yourself, that he’d offend again.”

“Yes.”

“Yet he hasn’t come to police notice at all. No convictions, no arrests, no information reports. Nothing.”

“Then he’s either out of the country or he’s dead,” Jarratt answered. “Only pray it’s the latter.”

“Or maybe we just haven’t caught him.”

Jarratt gave a low laugh. “I know we’re not perfect, but there’s never been a repeat offender who hasn’t been caught within a couple of years. Even in the dark ages, before computer cross-referencing, DNA,
Crimewatch,
we still caught the people eventually. They would always make a mistake.

“No. If he was in the country, he would be offending. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself any more than we could stop treating everybody with suspicion. It’s in his nature. Or he may have become a ghost, never keeping one identity too long, never staying in one place longer than a couple of months. He’s capable.”

“I’ll check with public records,” said Sally. “See if they have anything on him. And thanks to you, we’ll have a set of fingerprints for him. I’ll have them compared to any marks recovered from our scene.”

Jarratt’s eyes narrowed. “If it’s a death certificate or fingerprints you find, then please call me. If he’s sunning himself in Thailand, I’d rather not know.”

Sally thought Jarratt suddenly looked old. She wouldn’t push him any further. “Well, thanks for your time,” she said, and stood to leave. “Oh, one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“You did take photographs of Korsakov, when you charged him?”

“Of course.”

“It’s just, when I checked his intelligence records at Richmond, there were no photographs attached.”

“Unfortunate, but not unusual,” Jarratt replied.

“Can you think of anyone else who may have wanted or needed photographs of Korsakov?” Sally asked. “Maybe I can still track them down.”

“Not really,” Jarratt answered. “No one’s ever approached me about him.”

Sally sighed. “Oh well, never mind.”

Jarratt led her to the front door. His hand rested on the handle, but he didn’t turn it. “Can I ask what put you on to Korsakov?” he asked. “What put you on to me?”

“Method Index,” Sally told him. “You were down as the officer in the case.” Jarratt said nothing. “Oh shit,” Sally suddenly said, fumbling in her handbag. “I almost forgot. Could you do me a favor and have a look at this photo?” She pulled the surveillance photograph of Hellier out and handed it to Jarratt. “Do you recognize him?”

Jarratt held the photograph and looked at it without interest. Sally saw nothing in his face. “No,” he said. “Is it someone I should know?”

“Just a loose end I wanted to tie up, and now I have. Anyway, thanks for your time.”

“Anytime,” Jarratt said. “It’s nice to feel useful again.” They shook hands before Sally left and headed to her car.

H
e’s a sly one, all right,” Donnelly said, “thinking on his feet. Covering our evidence as we find it.”

“Then we’ll have to find more,” said Sean.

“How about DNA? Body samples?”

“Irrelevant,” Sean reminded him. “He admits to having sex with the victim, and now he admits to being in his flat—any samples we find prove nothing. That wouldn’t matter if we were to find the victim’s blood on Hellier or his clothing, but it’s going to take the lab days to process the things we seized today.”

“So what are we going to do—just let him walk out of here?”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Sean answered. “We charge him now, we’re saying we’ve got enough evidence to convict him. We both know that’s the rule. Once he’s charged, we lose the right to question him further or to take more samples. We charge him now and we couldn’t even make him take part in a fucking identification parade. I’ve made that mistake before. I’m not going to make it again. We have to come at him from another angle. One he won’t be expecting.”

“You’re talking about identifying another crime he’s committed?” Donnelly asked, without enthusiasm.

“I am,” Sean confirmed, noting Donnelly’s skepticism. “Something occurred to me during the interview. What if he’s making it up—the whole story about having an ongoing client-customer relationship?”

“I don’t follow.”

“What if he wasn’t having any sort of relationship with Graydon? What would that mean?”

Donnelly shrugged in confusion.

“It could mean he’d selected Graydon. Simply picked him from the crowd and killed him. All this bollocks about seeing him every few weeks, Graydon taking care of his physical needs, it’s all a smoke screen, trying to confuse us—throw us off the scent. He’s trying to lead us by the nose in the wrong direction. Maybe it’s so much simpler than we were thinking: he went looking for a victim and found one, then he killed him. But he made mistakes—he was recognized in the club and he left a single print at the scene. Now he’s covering his tracks, trying to make up for those mistakes. He knows that if he admits he’s only ever seen Graydon once, then he’s flagging himself up as a predator. He’ll bring us right down on top of him. Much better this way. He thinks he’s smart enough to get away with it, and that will be his downfall.”

“But we know he did see the victim at least once before,” Donnelly reminded him. “The doorman, Young, saw them together outside the club, remember? He was a distance away, but he was sure it was them and he was sure they headed off together, so he couldn’t have just picked him up the night he killed him.”

Sean had already considered everything Donnelly had said. “Of course he’d seen him before. Been with him before. That was important to him.”

“Why?” Donnelly asked.

“Because that made the victim real. He needed to taste him and feel him. Fantasize about him. So he picks him up inside or outside the club, it doesn’t really matter, and they probably go back to Graydon’s. They have sex. Hellier drinks it all in—absorbs everything—and once he’s sure Graydon is worthy of his special attentions he leaves, but watches him. He watches him for days, his excitement building, the fantasy in his mind growing increasingly violent and depraved until he can stand it no more, so he waits for him, outside the club. When Graydon eventually appears, alone, he follows him. Stalks him. Maybe he followed him all the way home or maybe he stopped him in the street—the victim wouldn’t be too afraid; after all, they’d already had paying sex together. But whatever happened once they were back at the flat, Hellier made his fantasy come true. Only, as we know, he made two mistakes: the fingerprint and being seen with the victim. So he spins us this story about some sort of relationship he was having with the victim and has us chasing our tails, desperately trying to establish some logical reason for why he would want to kill Graydon, knowing we’ll never find one, because there isn’t one. And while we’re looking for it we’ll miss the real reason he killed Daniel Graydon—because he wanted to. Because he had to.”

“Christ,” Donnelly cursed. “So what now?”

“Take someone with you and bail Hellier out. Tell him to come back in two weeks. His attorney will ask why he needs to come back. Tell him we’ll be checking his story. That Hellier hasn’t been eliminated yet.

“And scramble the surveillance team again. I want Hellier picked up the second he steps out of the station. We run twenty-four-hour coverage. We keep the pressure on and wait for him to drop the ball. Sooner or later he’s going to hang himself. Who knows, maybe he already has.”

H
ellier stood in the corridor of the police station, waiting to exit the building. First Templeman went outside to ensure no one was about. When he returned, the news wasn’t good.