The Death Collector (45 page)

Evans turned to Hunter. ‘So is there anything we should know? At this moment, sir,’ and the
sir
came with emphasis, ‘things are not looking good for you. You missed the chance to dig up David Jex, one of our own. You missed the chance to rescue Carl Jex, the son of one of our own. And this somehow seems connected to the abduction of Alice Parker, the wife of one of our own. I might be speaking out of turn, but you’re going to get pretty unpopular if you don’t start talking.’

Before Hunter could say anything, Sam’s phone pinged. A message.

Sam looked up at Evans and then back at his phone. He tapped in a quick
yes.

There was a short delay, and then another ping. When he opened the message, the room swam in front of him. Hunter became blurred, and he might have been saying something but no sounds could make it through, as if his head had been plunged into water.

He didn’t pass the phone over, it was taken from his hand, and the gasp Evans made was the sound that jolted him back into the room.

It was a picture message. Alice in dirty and wet sweatpants and a grey T-shirt, her outfit for a quiet evening in front of the television, the wind-down after a long day, except that she wasn’t relaxing with a glass of wine. She was lying on the ground, a grubby gag across her mouth that pulled her cheeks back. No, that was wrong. She was
in
the ground, the muddied walls of a shallow grave visible.

It hadn’t just been the sight of her in there that had made Sam nearly pass out. It had been the look in her eyes. Wide and frightened, terror in them that Sam had never seen before.

Another message came. Evans opened it this time and read out loud, ‘I’m filling in the hole now, Alice inside. If Hunter tells you what happened to David Jex, and you tell me, I’ll let you know where Alice is. You might get to her in time. I’ll leave the phone on now, because I’m on the move, gone, disappearing, a new start. I’m just clearing out the deadwood before I leave.’

Evans pointed angrily at Hunter. ‘You better start talking. If we find her dead and you said nothing, you’re finished.’

It was Weaver who spoke up, his voice weak and defeated. ‘He’s finished anyway, if he talks. Me too.’

‘This isn’t about you any more!’ Sam shouted, advancing towards him. ‘It’s about my fucking wife.’

Evans stood in front of him. ‘Sam, not now.’ She turned to Weaver. ‘So if you’re finished, at least do the right thing.’

Hunter’s head turned between the two of them and then to Weaver. ‘Don’t you dare.’

Weaver took a deep breath and wiped away the tears that were soaking his cheeks.

‘I’ll tell you,’ Weaver said, his voice a croak. ‘But you have got to know that it was all him, all his idea.’

‘What was?’

Weaver swallowed, rubbed his hands together, and said, ‘DCI Hunter killed David Jex.’

Evans looked at Hunter, her mouth open.

There was movement, Hunter rushing at Weaver, a fist raised, shouting something unintelligible in raw fury. Sam got there first. He smashed his forearm into the side of Hunter’s jaw, knocking him to the floor, blood splashing from his mouth onto the wall.

As Hunter lay stunned, groaning and wheezing, Sam turned to Weaver and said, ‘You better start talking, and make it good.’

Declan Farrell dragged Alice out of the hole. He pushed her back towards the cottage. She stumbled. He grabbed the rope round her wrists and pulled her, dragging her along the floor, her clothes getting muddier. He threw her against the wall once they were back inside.

He straightened, sweat sticking his shirt to his back, dirty trails across his forehead where he had wiped away the perspiration.

Alice drew her knees up to her chest, her feet blackened. She put her head down and shivered.

There was a small posy of flowers against the wall, just pansies in a small ribbon. He had left them there a couple of weeks earlier. They were dried out and the stalks were rotting, but it was still enough to invoke some memories, his mother’s body buried not far beneath. She would never move from there, be transported around by the ever-shifting peat soil. The walls would keep her in.

He went over to Alice and pulled down her gag. She gasped and smacked her lips to try to get some moisture back into her mouth.

‘Don’t scream,’ he said quietly, putting his finger to her lips, almost tenderly.

She recoiled and then nodded quickly, tears streaming down her face. She gulped and said, ‘What are you going to do me?’ He didn’t answer straight away. ‘I’m a mother. Please don’t kill me. My babies shouldn’t grow up without me.’

That stalled him. He looked back again at the dying flowers and for a moment his mind was flooded with memories. Her laughter, the feel of her cheap dress against his cheeks as she held him close to her, static dancing on his cheeks; swaying with her in front of the fire, his father glaring from the nearby chair. Her laugh was easy, happiness just one of the gifts life gave her. His father had to go looking for it, and was often found wanting.

For a moment, tears tickled his eyes, but then the memory of her cold hand as he helped his father bury her came back to him and pushed them away. His emotions retreated, like the slam of a door. Only the recall of his father’s arms wheeling at the top of the stairs gave him any satisfaction.

It was the look in his eyes that stayed with him. Acceptance, and knowledge of what he had turned his son into.

Declan pushed her gag back over her mouth and stepped away. He went to the window and gazed out at the moonlight that cast a silver glow on the moors.

Hunter pulled himself up onto his haunches, pointing at Weaver, wiping the blood from his lips onto the sleeve of his jacket. ‘You need to be quiet,’ he shouted, and then to Sam, ‘And you too. That’s an assault. I should have you arrested.’

Weaver laughed, in derision at first, tears still streaming down his face, but then it got louder, more hysterical.

‘Talk,’ Evans said.

Weaver’s hysteria disappeared as he said, ‘Do you suspect me of being connected with the death of David Jex? So you have to arrest me, which means you can’t ask me any more questions now if you want this ever to be mentioned in a court.’

Evans clenched her jaw.

‘So this is just about finding Alice, right?’

‘You bastard,’ Sam said.

‘Or I can shut up right now and not give you anything,’ Weaver snapped back. ‘Is that what you’d prefer?’

‘Just talk,’ Evans said.

Weaver put his head back and let his tears subside before saying, ‘Declan Farrell killed Rebecca Scarfield, not Aidan Molloy. And we might have caught him if we had kept on looking, done a proper job on the cars we were looking at, except he was too hung up on Aidan Molloy.’ And he jabbed his finger towards Hunter. ‘That’s all it was for him. Aidan or no one, because Aidan had been meddling in Rebecca’s marriage, the assistant chief’s little angel.’

‘So when did you know?’ Evans said.

‘When Melissa Clarke went missing. David Jex was doing most of the work on that, and he had been with us when we looked at Rebecca, so he knew both cases. It was the library book group thing that did it. That was where Melissa went, and it was where Rebecca worked, and David became suspicious. He got a list of every dark red Ford Focus in the north-west and was working through it, trying to find a link with the library.’

‘So Joe is right,’ Sam said. ‘The witness statements were false. You wrote them up to make them fit Aidan.’

‘It wasn’t as simple as that,’ Weaver said, as if he was pleading for understanding. ‘We spoke with the witnesses who saw the car, and Hunter thought they had got the car wrong, because he was certain it was Aidan Molloy, particularly when Aidan’s mother changed her story. So he talked them into thinking that it was Aidan’s car they had seen. Like he said at the time, if they had been so certain, they wouldn’t have changed their story. And Aidan’s mother had lied, Aidan too, and he had the motive as Rebecca was going back to her husband. We thought we had done the right thing. Yeah, we had twisted the evidence a bit, but for the right reason.’

‘What about the spade in the boot, with peat soil on it?’ Sam said.

Weaver looked down for a few seconds before saying, ‘We bought it from a DIY shop and stuck it into the ground, and put it into Aidan’s car when we took it away.’

Evans gasped. ‘That goes way too far. Talking witnesses round is bad enough, but that? Planting evidence?’

‘Oh come on,’ Hunter said, making everyone look round. ‘Who hasn’t dropped some drugs in a house to justify a search or an arrest, or into someone’s pocket? Padded out a statement to make it say what we needed? It’s a matter of degree.’

‘I haven’t,’ Sam said.

Hunter scowled in response.

‘We were trying to put away Rebecca’s killer, that’s all,’ Weaver said. ‘Why is it always us that have to play fair? We couldn’t let Aidan just get away with it.’

‘But he hadn’t done anything,’ Evans said, incredulous.

‘Yeah, well, I know that now.’

‘So tell us about David Jex.’

Weaver took a deep breath.

‘David got panicky,’ Weaver said. ‘He realised that we were in trouble. He whittled it down to Declan Farrell and did some background checks on him. Farrell had form, a couple of assaults on ex-girlfriends, and had been arrested for a rape once but it hadn’t gone anywhere. It was a married woman and she wouldn’t go into any detail. She’d been found bloodied and sobbing, and she told a friend but wouldn’t speak to us, in case her husband found out. When David went through Rebecca’s case again, he found a connection to Farrell. She had gone away for the night once, told her husband that she was staying with a friend, but she had gone to a hotel. The bill showed up on her bank statement. When David went through Farrell’s bank statements, he found a bar bill payment from the same night at the same hotel.’ Weaver scoffed. ‘Farrell didn’t even have the decency to pay for the room, just a couple of drinks.’

‘That might have been his leverage,’ Evans said. ‘Accumulate evidence that she is having an affair and she becomes scared; he’s got something to use.’

‘So David convinced us that Aidan hadn’t done it, and that Farrell was the killer,’ Weaver said, and glared at Hunter.

‘So what did you decide to do?’ Evans said.

‘We need to get a move on,’ Sam said, starting to pace. ‘This is about Alice, not Weaver cleansing his soul.’

‘We need the story,’ Evans said. ‘That’s what he said.’

‘David wanted to come clean,’ Weaver said. ‘If we got into trouble, that was just tough. We had done wrong, and we didn’t have to admit to the spade or the wrong witness statements. All we had to do was pin it on Farrell and get Aidan out of jail. But that prick,’ and Weaver pointed at Hunter, ‘he thought it was too risky for us, that we might end up passing Aidan at the prison gate, with us on the way in for a while as he came out. So he decided to kill him.’

‘What, David Jex?’ Evans said, incredulous.

‘No, Declan Farrell,’ Weaver said, slamming his hand on the chair. ‘He was a cold murdering bastard, we knew that because of Rebecca, and we had no idea where Melissa was, but she seemed dead to us. What loss would he be to humanity? None, that’s what. So we waited for him after the book club, until everyone else had gone, and we lifted him. No one saw us, we knew that. Hunter drove. David and I wedged him in the back, and we were going to do to him what he was going to do to Rebecca.’

‘Bury him on the moors,’ Evans said.

Weaver looked down, rubbing his hands. ‘David was quiet all the way. We had a spade in the boot and a lump hammer. We were going to hurt him first, just for what he had done to Rebecca, and then bury him. No one would ever find him, we were sure of that. We got away from the road so no one would see us, and just as we were going to start on him, David said we shouldn’t.’

‘It’s conspiracy to murder,’ Evans said.

‘That’s what David said, and that we shouldn’t go through with it, and he got physical, tried to wrestle the hammer away, and that bastard…⁠’ And Weaver pointed at Hunter again. ‘He started swinging that thing, the hammer.’ He took a deep breath and looked up at Evans, and then to Sam. ‘Have you ever heard a melon hit the ground? It’s like a liquid crack, and that’s what it sounded like when the hammer hit David on the side of the head. He went straight down and he didn’t move. I touched his head and I could feel the fracture in the skull. It was a dent and the bone moved. I didn’t think he was breathing. So we panicked. Farrell was gone by this time. He’d started running as soon as David went down, and he must know those moors well, because I tried to chase him and I just couldn’t catch him. It was like the darkness just swallowed him up.’

‘So you buried David Jex?’ Sam said.

Weaver nodded. ‘Hunter thought he’d killed him. What could we do? Say,
Oh, we meant to kill someone else?’

‘So you watched Lorna Jex grieve and sob for her husband, and you knew all along where he was?’ Sam said.

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘You’re a coward.’

‘Yes again. And Declan Farrell had us. He wrote up everything that had happened, including the map reference as to where they could find David, and joined one of those online legacy sites. You know, where if you don’t log in for sixty days, whatever you store there is sent to a nominated person, a way of passing on your crucial information if you die suddenly. Your passwords, things like that. He told us he had put Lorna’s name in, and Rebecca’s father, and Melissa’s husband, Mary Molloy and two newspapers.’