Gone to Ground (36 page)

"Mrs. Maitland, you're making a mistake."

"Gary, come on."

They got almost to the door before the uniformed officer moved to intercept them.

Parsons was swiftly out of his chair. "Gary Maitland," he said, placing a hand on his shoulder, "I am arresting you under the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861..."

Among the personal belongings Maitland handed over to the custody sergeant was his mobile phone. And among the images stored therein, were a number which matched those Parsons had previously seen on a right-wing Web site, similar, if not identical, to those established as having been taken in Cambridge, close to Magdelene Bridge.

Some days, Parsons had learned from an old hippie song his father had liked to play, you got the bear and some days the bear got you.

Well, this was shaping up to be one of those days you got the bear.

"WILL," LORRAINE CALLED DOWN. "KEEP YOUR EYE ON the toast a minute."

"Okay," Will called back. He was cleaning his shoes.

Jake was crying over a plastic toy that had failed to emerge from a packet of Rice Krispies. Susie was upstairs with Lorraine, presumably having her nappy changed. Why was it that, unless you stood over the toast every second, the moment your head turned away was the moment it started to burn?

"Will!"

"I've got it. It's fine."

If they could find some way of getting the toaster mended, or, more simply, buy another one, there would be no need to make toast under the grill. The thing was, Will preferred toast made that way: he could cut slices as thick as he liked.

He was still scraping away at the charred edges when Lorraine came back down, Susie on her hip.

"I hope that's your piece, not mine."

"There's another piece on for you," Will said.

The tea in the pot was stewed and Lorraine poured it away and set the kettle to boil anew.

"Helen came round yesterday."

Will set the butter knife aside. "You never said."

"I'm telling you now. She was bored, I think. Wanted someone to talk to."

"What about?"

Lorraine fastened the last of the straps, securing Susie in her rock-a-tot. "Oh, nothing special."

"It's a long way to come for nothing special."

"Like I say, she was bored. Can't wait to get back to work."

"You want marmalade on this toast or jam?"

"Jam. As long as you don't burn it like you did the last piece."

Reaching round, Will slid the grill pan to safety. Lorraine took Jake's bowl and plastic mug and, with a warning that she'd check to make sure he'd done them properly, sent him off to clean his teeth and wash his face and hands. She poured boiling water into the pot, swirled it round several times, and emptied it into the sink, then dropped two tea bags down inside and covered them with more water.

"How did she seem?" Will asked when they were sitting down. "Helen?"

"Okay, I think. Pretty well, considering what happened."

"She talk about it at all?"

Lorraine shook her head.

"What did you talk about then?"

"I told you, nothing special. Just this and that, you know?" Lorraine laughed. "We didn't waste our time talking about you, if that's what you're thinking."

Will felt himself blushing slightly.

"Far better things to do."

Will reached around for the pot and poured the tea.

"Jake," Lorraine called up the stairs. "Have you done your teeth yet?"

"Just about to," came the reply.

Will kept turning it over in his mind while he was driving to work, something he quite liked by the Pet Shop Boys, but couldn't name, playing quietly on Radio 2.

Quite why the thought of Lorraine and Helen spending time together unsettled him he wasn't sure, but unsettle him it did. Something about keeping work and home separate? He wasn't sure.

One thing he was sure of: the sooner Helen was back in harness the better.

The temperature must have risen five degrees. Chris Parsons had dispensed with his jacket and then his tie, undone the first three buttons of his denim shirt. Mr. Casual in pale gray slacks, cuffs of his shirt rolled back. Opposite him, Gary Maitland was squirming in his seat and starting to sweat. The scab alongside his mouth had been almost picked clean.

Parsons's questioning was consistent and level-toned, probing at the same small points over and over again. Little or nothing so far about which either Gary's mother or the assigned duty solicitor could complain.

As the questioning continued, however, the assault on Quadeer Ali and his girlfriend slipped more and more to one side, in favour of the homophobic attack in Cambridge.

"May I remind you," the solicitor pointed out, "this incident, regrettable as it is, is not the one for which my client has been charged."

Parsons looked pointedly at the images which had been downloaded from Maitland's phone and printed onto sheets of eight by ten. "If that's what concerns you, we could probably arrange it anytime now."

The solicitor sat back in his chair.

Christine Maitland closed her eyes; the lines around her mouth seemed more deeply etched than ever.

"Tell me about these photos, Gary," Parsons said again. "Tell me how they came to be on your phone."

The denials were evasive and contradictory. Gary didn't know. It wasn't his phone. He'd borrowed it to call one of his mates, call his mum. Nicked it from one of his brothers. Someone must have stuck it in his pocket when they were running away. Or okay, it was his, he'd bought it just a few days ago. In the park, the pub, from someone he didn't know. Never seen them before or since. He'd swapped the SIM card, hadn't he? Swiped it from one of his mates. Never knew them pictures were there, never seen them before. And that evening, the evening Parsons kept on about, he'd been home, hadn't he? Home with his mum. Watching tele, most likely. What else was there to do?

Yes, Christine Maitland confirmed, Gary had been in all that evening. The two of them. Maybe Dennis, one of his brothers, had looked in, she couldn't be sure. But they'd been there. Watching tele, like Gary'd said, she couldn't remember what.

She didn't sound as if she believed it herself.

Time ticked on.

Parsons was far from sure the charge of assaulting Quadeer Ali with intention to cause actual bodily harm would stand up; passed on to the CPS, it might not get past first glance. And was the presence of those images on the mobile found in his possession sufficient to tie him into the Cambridge incident conclusively?

Maybe a bit more leverage would help.

Another voice, another point of view.

He had alerted both Rastrick and Grayson earlier and now he called Will Grayson again. The line busy, he left a message and twenty minutes later Will phoned him back.

Maitland? Maitland?

It rang a bell, Will thought, but he couldn't be sure which one.

It would come to him, he was certain of that.

When it did, he rang Parsons again. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

***

Three brothers, Gary, Dennis and Lee, ten years between them. Lee was the eldest. Lee Maitland. When Will had remembered the name, he'd checked back in the file to make sure. Two young men who had been arrested for the arson attack on a terraced house in Forest Fields, November 2002: Lee Maitland and Mark Knight. Knight it was who had set fire to a building at his primary school; Maitland had come to the attention of both police and social services on a number of occasions but without ever ending up in court. Due to a lack of sufficient evidence, both arson charges were dropped.

Parsons let Maitland have a meal break while he and Will talked, Will filling him in on the investigation into Howard Prince and its possible connections to the Bryan murder.

"This Lee," Parsons said, "you think he's still around?"

"We can find out."

"Still doing favours for Prince?"

"It's a possibility."

No expenses spared, Parsons had sent one of the PCs out for deep-fried chicken and chips and a can of Coke; before Maitland had finished the last of the chips, tech services had come up with an audit trail for the mobile phone.

Looking over the printout, Parsons whistled.

There were three calls listed to the Newmarket area in the days immediately preceding the attack in which Helen had been injured, one early that evening and another, to the same mobile number but now in Cambridge itself, no more than an hour before the actual attack took place.

"This and the photographs, doesn't leave poor Gary an awful lot of room for maneuver," Will said.

Parsons grinned. "Short and curlies time."

"You think he'll start talking?"

"Unless he's made out of stronger stuff than I've got him marked down for, I don't see he's got a lot of alternatives."

Back in the interview room, there were greasy spots down Maitland's front and a flake of something orangey-brown adhering to the pinkish scab alongside his mouth.

"Liam Ibbotson," Parsons said. "A good friend of yours, is he?"

"Never heard of him," Maitland said.

"How about his cousin, Evan?"

Maitland shook his head.

"You don't know Evan?"

"No."

"Funny. You spoke to him the same evening you and your pals stalked those two students in Cambridge; not so long before you beat the holy shit out of them."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Maitland's voice now close to a whine.

"And those other calls, earlier. To Newmarket. Setting things up. Where to meet and when. Bit of an organizer, Gary, I can see that. Bit of a shaker and mover."

"Shut up!"

"Sorry?"

"I said, shut up!"

The solicitor gave Parsons a warning look. Christine Maitland reached for her son's hand, but he pulled it away.

"Let me tell you a story, Gary," Parsons said, leaning forward. "About these men. They didn't like gays. Didn't like homosexuals. Thought they were vermin. Weak. Contemptible. Hated them. Hate, Gary, you know what that means?"

There were tears welling up behind Maitland's eyes.

"They went out, a couple of men I've had dealings with, on to the common, in London, looking for a gay man to beat up. And this man they found, they didn't even know if he was gay, but they thought he was and that was enough. They called him every hateful name they could think of and started hitting him and by the time they'd finished punching him and kicking him he had over thirty different injuries and he was dead. They killed him. Because he was gay. Because they thought he was gay."

Maitland was biting the inside of his lower lip, raising blood.

"Under a new tariff for hate crimes against homosexuals, they were sentenced to a minimum of twenty-eight years in prison. Twenty-eight years before they'll be eligible for parole."

A sob broke from Maitland's throat.

"I don't know how many favours you can do yourself here, Gary—your solicitor will inform you as best he can—but unless you want to take all the blame for what happened, if there were others involved in the attack on those two students, more involved possibly than you, I should start naming names."

Maitland pitched abruptly forward, slamming his face against the table, causing his nose to bleed.

"You and your client," Parsons said to the solicitor. "You might want time to consult."

It was late enough in the afternoon for the sun—what there was of it—to have dropped below the rooftops, leaving a pale smear of colour in its wake. Will leaned against the wall and watched Christine Maitland light a fresh cigarette from the embers of the last.

"It's not gonna make a scrap of difference, is it? No matter what he tells them now."

Gary had claimed that all the calls to Evan and Liam Ibbotson had been made by someone else using his phone. He had given that person's name. He admitted being present when the two students were attacked, but said he had struck no blows himself. Instead, he had pleaded with the others to stop. He gave Chris Parsons the names of six others who had been present and had taken part in the assault, including the one youth barely identifiable from the photographs posted on the Web.

Already, arrests had been made; others would follow.

"You never know," Will said. "It might help when it comes to sentencing, always assuming it gets that far. The judge might look at him more leniently."

She cast him a scornful glance. "Pigs might fuckin' fly."

Will fingered a mint from his pocket and slipped it into his mouth.

"Gary's elder brother, Lee—he doesn't still live at home."

Christine Maitland blew smoke down her nose. "Never comes near the place unless he wants summat. On the soddin' scrounge."

"You don't know where I might find him?" Will said.

"Lee? Scarcely ever see him."

"But you're in touch?"

A quick shake of the head. "Not really."

"But if it were important?"

She swiveled her body so that she was looking directly at him. "He's not involved in this, is he?"

"Not as far as I know."

"Thank Christ for that." She drew hard on her cigarette and then exhaled. "Last I knew he was working on this building site. Nottingham. Near the ice stadium. Some new hotel?"

Will thanked her and crumbled the mint between his teeth, anxious now to get back inside, anxious to go.

LEE MAITLAND DIDN'T SHOW UP FOR WORK THE FOLLOWing morning and neither the site foreman nor any of his mates had any idea why. His Meadows flat was empty; recently occupied, but empty. Most of his belongings were still there. A call from his mother, Will thought, the night before. Not really in touch. Not much.

"Think he'll go far?" Will said.

Parsons shook his head. "I don't think we'll be putting out a call to ports and airports, if that's what you mean. Couple of weeks in Ibiza aside, his sort, they don't tend to stray."

"Watch on the mother's place, then? Another here?"

"I'd say."

The hoarding on the fence around the site where Maitland was employed had Prince Holdings stenciled neatly in the bottom right-hand corner. White paint onto blue. Prince Holdings—Principal Contractor.