The Price Of Darkness (54 page)

Barrie had the grace to laugh. Faraday was right. Under the new legislation, they could lock a suspected terrorist up for twenty-eight days before facing a custody review.

‘Does revenge count as terrorism?’ he mused. ‘Maybe that’s a line you could try on Secretan.’

 

Superintendent Andy Secretan occupied a spacious, sunny office in the same block that housed Major Crimes. As the city’s senior cop, in charge of the Portsmouth OCU, he’d been in the post for three years, earning himself a solid reputation amongst coppers with a lifelong suspicion of senior rank. Secretan, it was commonly agreed, was a fair man. He’d got rid of the duffers, given praise where it was due and had refused a number of opportunities to showboat in the local press. To those who knew him well it came as no surprise to discover that mountaineering on the Isle of Skye was his favoured means of relaxation. This was a man who put a lot of faith in self-reliance. If the pitons gave way on the rock face and you fell to your death, the fault was entirely your own.

He waved Faraday into a chair beside his desk. He was a tall man, quietly spoken.

‘I’ve just talked to Martin Barrie.’ He nodded at the phone. ‘You can assume I know the background.’

Faraday went quickly through the meagre evidence that had led to Freeth’s arrest. Secretan wasn’t impressed.

‘That’s on the thin side, Joe. What else have you got?’

‘Freeth had access to Frank Greetham’s file of correspondence on the Gullifant’s collapse. I just checked with SOC. D/C Suttle’s up at the house now. He’s telling me that the minister’s name is ringed and underlined. At the time he was with the Department of Work and Pensions.’

‘You think Freeth did that? Rather than Frank Greetham?’

‘It’s possible. We have a witness who says that Freeth was familiar with the file. Either way, it still gives Freeth a motive for killing the minister. He’s nothing if not thorough.’

‘But can you prove it?’

‘Not yet, sir. We’ve seized the PC in the house but it’s still awaiting hard-disk analysis. There may be Google searches, e-mails, all kinds of stuff.’

‘That’s in hand?’

‘Yes, sir. Then there’s the lad, Dermott O’Keefe.’

Faraday outlined the operation under way in Fishguard. So far, he admitted, there’d been no further reports from the two D/Cs.

‘But you think another twelve hours might see you through?’

‘I do, sir, yes. The last interview gave us indications that Freeth isn’t as sure of himself as he thought. It’s reasonable to suppose that he was en route to Fishguard when we nicked him. He was carrying a passport. You can get a ferry to Ireland from Fishguard. Even if we bail him, I’m not sure we’ll see him again.’

‘This is an ex-copper, am I right? A D/C?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re telling me he did the firearms course before he left us?’

‘Yes.’

Secretan nodded. His face was grey with exhaustion. Pompey was his beat, his responsibility, and since Goldsmith Avenue he’d been working eighteen-hour days.

‘OK.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got Freeth’s brief in the outer office. Give me a ring in ten minutes.’

 

Bill Prosper was one of three Coroner’s Officers working out of a cluttered office in the wing of the city’s Guildhall. Jimmy Suttle had never had dealings with the man but knew of his lifelong antipathy to Paul Winter. Now, early afternoon, he asked to see the file on Frank Greetham’s suicide.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Major Crimes inquiry. Operation
Billhook.
My guvnor’s D/I Faraday. Phone him if you need to.’

Prosper ignored the invitation. He was a big, ponderous man, exactly the type, thought Suttle, to hold a grudge.

‘How is he then?’

‘Who?’

‘Winter. I hear they drummed him out. Not before fucking time, son. I always said that man was a disgrace.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know so. I served with him in the early days. Bent as you like. Even then. What’s the bloke’s name again?’

‘Greetham. Frank Arthur. He committed suicide seven weeks ago.’

Still grumbling to himself, Prosper made his way to a filing cabinet in the storeroom next door. Suttle was eyeing a spare desk beside the window. By the time Prosper returned he’d also spotted a curl of steam from the office kettle and was trying to figure out where they kept the Nescafe.

‘Help yourself, son.’ Prosper wasn’t good at irony. ‘That’s exactly the kind of liberty Winter would have taken.’

Suttle carried the coffee to the spare desk and settled down with the file. What interested him most was the attending P/C’s account of the morning he’d been dispatched to Westbourne Road. The call had come in at 07.32. Charlie Freeth and a distraught Julie Greetham had been waiting at the house.

The lock-up was a couple of streets away. All three of them had gone to the scene. Freeth had already broken a window at the back of the lock up to gain entry and managed to turn off the engine before beating a retreat. The lock-up was thick with carbon monoxide and he’d broken a second window and waited for the fumes to clear before climbing in again.

He’d found Frank Greetham slumped over the wheel. His flesh was cold to the touch and in Freeth’s opinion he’d been dead some time. Freeth had tried to open the front doors to the garage but Greetham had secured them with a chain and padlock. Unable to lay hands on a key, Freeth had finally managed to get the doors open. With the draught the fumes had cleared in minutes.

Suttle finished his coffee, reading carefully through the rest of the file, noting other witness statements - from Julie, from Freeth, from colleagues at work, from Greetham’s GP - all of them testifying to a man whose faith in a decent life, decently led, had been tested to destruction by the events of the spring and early summer.

Somewhere amongst these bare, shocked accounts of Frank Greetham’s death, Suttle had hoped to find a clue or two, some tiny morsel of evidence that might pin Charlie Freeth against the wall, but picturing the scene in the lock-up, tasting the fumes in the back of his throat, all he could summon was the conviction that no life should end like this. At the inquest the Coroner had recorded a verdict of Death by Suicide, adding a personal note of sympathy for those who had loved and cared for Frank Greetham.
A good man
, he’d written.
Sorely missed.
Too right, Suttle thought, getting to his feet.

Prosper’s bulk occupied a desk on the other side of the office. He looked up at Suttle’s approach. Suttle wanted to know what remained from the inquest in terms of hard evidence.

‘Nothing.’ Prosper nodded towards the property cupboard. ‘Except the padlock and chain from the garage. You want a copy of that report?’

‘Please.’

‘The machine’s over there. Help yourself.’

 

Faraday was in conference with Yates and Ellis when the call from the
Billhook
incident room found him at the Bridewell. It was D/S Glen Thatcher. He had a mobile number for one of the D/Cs in Fishguard. He needed to have a word with the guvnor. Urgently. Faraday wanted to know what it was about.

‘It’s complicated, boss. Best to talk to him yourself.’

Faraday rang the number. On the other end, in seconds, was D/C Phelps. At twenty-four, he was the youngest detective on the squad.

‘We’ve got the nipper, boss. I’m looking at him now.’

‘
What
?’ Faraday got to his feet, turned his back on Yates and Ellis.

‘He turned up just after lunch. He’d texted Freeth’s mobile earlier and mentioned taking a boat for Ireland. We moved the Toyota down by the ferry port. Kid couldn’t miss it.’

‘He’s secure?’

‘Sure.’ Phelps was laughing. ‘He’s sitting in the back. We’ve got the child locks on.’

‘And what’s he saying?’

‘Not much so far. Except he’s been in France for ten days.’

‘
France
?’

‘That’s a roger, boss. I’m looking at his passport and tickets. He did the Poole-Cherbourg crossing on Saturday the ninth. Took the return trip last night, then caught an early train to Fishguard this morning, via Bristol. The paperwork’s all here.’

Faraday shook his head. Couldn’t be, he thought. Just couldn’t be. The hit on the minister had been on Monday the eleventh. No way could Dermott O’Keefe have been on the back of the Kawasaki.

‘Have you searched him at all? The boy?’

‘Certainly have, boss. We’ve got an address and a phone number in County Kilkenny. You want to have a guess at the name?’

‘O’Keefe?’

‘Spot-on. And guess what else we found. This one’s for the jackpot.’

‘Pass.’

‘Nearly three thousand quid.’ The laughter again. ‘In notes.’

 

Martin Barrie called the conference for six o’clock. Willard had driven down from Winchester. Jerry Proctor, the Crime Scene Co-ordinator, had spent the afternoon reviewing the forensic harvest from both major inquiries. The D/S in charge of
Polygon
Outside Enquiries was sitting beside D/S Glen Thatcher, who’d come over from the Fareham MCT, while Faraday occupied a chair near the end of the table. This shotgun marriage of
Billhook
and
Polygon
, an event Barrie had privately likened to the moment when two atoms triggered a chain reaction, was the last thing any of these men had expected, and even now Faraday sensed a deep reluctance to accept that the terrorist fantasy might be over.

Willard was the first to put this thought into words. Not that he didn’t want to believe it but because he knew the strength of the case they’d have to make. A great deal of political weight lay behind MI5’s conviction that the minister had been killed by a new strain of the al-Qaeda virus. The news that he had in fact been shot at the hands of an avenging ex-cop would come as a bit of a shock.

‘We have to be a thousand per cent on this if D/I Faraday’s to be proved right.’ Willard was looking from face to face. ‘Joe?’

Faraday summarised the afternoon’s developments in Fishguard. The efforts of the two D/Cs, coupled with Faraday’s shrewdness in anticipating O’Keefe’s reappearance, earned a modest round of applause. Faraday himself, while flattered, knew exactly what was coming next.

‘So O’Keefe’s off the plot.’ It was Willard again. ‘Passport
and
tickets? Alibis don’t come better than that.’

Faraday conceded that O’Keefe couldn’t have been riding pillion. In a way, he said, the news had come as a bit of a relief.

‘I know things are bad,’ he said. ‘I know there are kids in Brixton running round with point forty-five Magnums. But the thought that a fifteen-year-old might have killed a government minister …’ He shook his head.

‘Quite.’ Jerry Proctor was studying his hands. ‘And the kid’s not even voting age.’

A ripple of laughter ran round the table. It didn’t extend as far as Willard.

‘So what’s Plan B, Joe? Who else would you put on the back of that bike?’

‘Julie Greetham.’

‘Who?’

‘Julie Greetham. She’s Frank’s daughter. She and Freeth are partners. They live in Frank’s old house. She’s small, thin, exactly the right build.’

‘I thought she was a teacher, Joe?’ It was Martin Barrie this time.

‘She is.’

‘So how come she’s got time to fit all this in?’

‘She wasn’t at school on the Monday. We checked this afternoon. She’s got a pretty dodgy attendance record as it is and Monday she logged as another sickie. If we’re talking opportunity, she had all day to sort herself out. Freeth wasn’t at Positivo, either. He had the whole of last week off. Julie’s motive? She’s just lost her dad. Her partner’s put together this cast-iron case against the minister. He has a file full of correspondence. He has findings from the Parliamentary Ombudsman. Accusations of maladministration. Plus promises of compensation that turn out to be completely empty. From her point of view, or maybe the minister’s, it couldn’t be worse. Freeth does some research. Finds out the bloke’s due down here. Gets himself a bike. Sets up the hit. This is the guy they think killed her dad. So who better to pull the trigger?’

It sounded, Faraday thought, entirely plausible. Willard was more interested in evidence. He looked down the table at the Crime Scene Co-ordinator.

‘Jerry?’

‘I think it’s a great theory.’ He smiled at Faraday. ‘From where I’m sitting, I just wish I could stand it up.’

Mallinder’s place at Port Solent, he said, had yielded nothing of any forensic value. Only the missing Mercedes keys had helped inch
Billhook
forward. As for Westbourne Road, his blokes were nearly through. They’d crawled over every room, subjected countless items to painstaking analysis, lifted floorboards, turned out the roof space, even dredged the waste trap beneath the washing machine and the pipe that ran to the main sewer in case it might yield anything worthwhile. This afternoon, aware that time was tight, he’d put in extra bodies to dig out the back garden, but again there’d been no sign of recent disturbance or hidden goodies. There was a box or two of seized paperwork to go through, but if it ever came to a court case, he said, he’d be making the briefest ever appearance in the witness box.

‘Joe?’ Willard wanted a reaction.

‘It’s a question of MO, sir. Both scenes were cleaned up. Not just cleaned up but virtually clue-free. My betting is we’ll find the same with the PC hard disk and probably the billings information. Freeth is a man who doesn’t make mistakes and both scenes prove it. This is the dog that didn’t bark in the night.’

‘Terrific, Joe.’ Willard mimed applause. ‘So how do we put that to a jury?’

‘We don’t, sir. We wait. We attack him with today’s developments. We tell him we’ve got a couple of hostages. O’Keefe for one. His girlfriend for another. For my money she’s on a nicking, and this time we’ve got her for twenty-four hours. That woman’s unstable. You can feel it. More importantly, Freeth knows it too. That means he can’t be sure anymore. He doesn’t know what we’re up to. He’s no longer in control.’