The Price Of Darkness (56 page)

‘Waiting where?’

‘Fishguard.’

‘
Fishguard
?’ Freeth laughed. ‘But I wasn’t in Fishguard. I was here. That was me down the corridor. Talk to the Custody skipper. He keeps a log.’

‘Sure. Of course he does. Of course you weren’t there. But your car was. And so were a couple of our blokes. Clever, eh? Not something you’d necessarily expected?’

Freeth raised an eyebrow, then sat back and studied his hands. He doesn’t want to believe it, Faraday thought. This wasn’t in the plan at all.

Yates explained about O’Keefe finding the empty car.

‘He walked straight to it, Mr Freeth. Are you telling me that was some kind of coincidence?’

Freeth said nothing. His head was down. When he looked up again, his eyes were glittering.

‘No comment,’ he said softly.

For the second time the man with all the answers was robbed of a reply. First the hospital, Faraday thought. Now this.

‘Young Dermott’s back in Fareham …’ Yates glanced at his watch. ‘… about now. We’ve arrested him for car theft but there’s something that still bugs us. Maybe you can help us out here. The pair of you do Mallinder’s place. We think you shot the man. We think you did a bloody good job. But why on earth did you let the lad nick the car keys?’

Hartley Crewdson began to protest. Freeth silenced him with a look.

‘That’s pathetic,’ he said softly. ‘And you know it.’

‘Explain.’

‘No comment.’ Freeth shook his head.

There was a long silence. Watching, Faraday realised just how shrewd he’d been in the choice of Yates for this interview. The two men were of similar age, similar temperament. They’d never known each other well, never worked together, but one had stayed in the job while the other hadn’t. As a result, by some strange chemistry the exchange had become intensely personal. Dawn Ellis knew it too. She’d crossed her arms, waiting.

‘Here’s another puzzler …’ Yates was pretending bewilderment. ‘That house of yours is squeaky clean. So clean we’re thinking of putting it in for an award. But there’s a problem with the paperwork. Why didn’t you tell us you were moving?’

‘Moving?’

‘Yeah. The SOC lads have played a blinder. There isn’t a floorboard they haven’t lifted. But you know what they told us tonight? After we started asking the right questions? They said they’d found house details, agents’ particulars, and you know where this place is? In County Kilkenny.’ Yates grinned at him. ‘Strange that. Given the address we lifted off young Dermott.’

‘No comment.’

‘No comment, you can’t think of an answer? Or no comment, you can’t be arsed?’

‘No comment.’

‘Shame.’ Yates flipped a page in his notebook. ‘Let’s stick with the boy a moment. He had three grand in his pocket. Where did that kind of money come from?’

‘No comment.’

‘We think he sold the Mercedes. Not a great price but then I expect some hookey dealer saw him off. Unless the rest went to his mum of course. Do you know Mrs O’Keefe?’

‘No comment.’

‘Fine woman. And Dermott’s a good lad too, if half what we hear is right. But then you’d know that, wouldn’t you? Enrolling him on the Junior Leader programme? Trusting him the way you did? Having him along for the ride on the Mallinder job?’

This time Freeth said nothing. His eyes held Yates’s gaze then he half-turned towards Crewdson before changing his mind.

‘You guys are crap,’ he said. ‘If this is the best you can do, then no wonder we’re all in the shit.’

‘In the shit? How does that work?’ Yates let the question dangle between them but Freeth shook his head, refusing to take the bait. At length Yates pushed his chair back, abandoning his pad. He was enjoying this. He wanted to take his time. ‘Let’s go back to Frank Greetham, Charlie. Let’s just take a look at why you’d want to settle a debt or two.’

His briefcase lay on the floor beside his chair. He produced a file of correspondence and began to leaf through it. Freeth barely spared it a glance.

‘This lot came from Sam Taylor, Charlie. Someone’s been making notes in the margin and we think that someone is you. Someone’s also been paying a lot of attention to the Minister of State for Pensions Reform. Here …’ Yates’s finger hovered over a name ringed in scarlet Pentel, ‘You want to take a look?’

Freeth shook his head.

‘Anyone could have done that.’ He nodded at the file. ‘The way I remember it, the job used to be about evidence. Not this bollocks.’

‘Evidence, Charlie?’ Yates’s smile was broader. ‘Let’s talk about the morning Frank died. Tell me exactly what happened. Pretend I know nothing.’

Freeth gazed at him a moment, weighing the question, looking for traps. Then he began to describe the sequence of events that had led him to the garage round the back, and to the realisation that Frank Greetham was sitting in the car with the engine running.

‘Was the garage locked?’

‘Yeah. From the inside.’

‘So you broke a window. Am I right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Waited for the fumes to clear?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then dived in and turned the engine off?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So what happened after that?’

‘I got out again. The place still stank. Frank was obviously dead. There was sod all I could do for him.’

‘And later? Once you needed a decent draught through the place?’

‘I got the front doors open.’

‘And how did you do that?’

Freeth hesitated. Yates asked the question again. When Freeth didn’t answer, he produced another document from the briefcase.

‘This is a copy of the Coroner’s Report, Charlie. You gave the Coroner’s Officer a statement. You told him that the doors had been secured with a length of chain and a padlock. You had to break the chain to get the doors open. How did you do that?’

Freeth was eyeing the report.

‘With a pair of bolt cutters,’ he said at length.

‘Bolt cutters,’ Yates repeated. ‘And where did you find them?’

‘In the garage. They belonged to Frank.’

‘Indeed. And he’d had them a long time, hadn’t he? So long, there were little tiny nicks on the blades. You know about forensics, Charlie. You know what they can do with blow-ups in the laboratory, electron microscopes, metallurgical analysis, cut-patterns, all that bollocks.’ He paused. ‘Do I hear a yes? Am I getting warmer?’

Freeth said nothing. When Crewdson protested that this line of questioning was oppressive, Yates returned to the report.

‘The Coroner still has the chain from the garage,’ he said. ‘We’ll be submitting it for laboratory analysis.’

‘So?’ Freeth shrugged.

‘We’ll also be submitting a pair of bolt cutters we recovered from the grounds at St James’ Hospital. Along with a chain that secured the Kawasaki you nicked from outside a pub in Sholing. That’s the Kawasaki you used for the hit in Goldsmith Avenue.’

‘The defence minister?’ Freeth seemed to be losing interest. ‘You think I did that too?’

‘We do, Charlie, we do. And you know why we’ve got that chain? Because you left it outside the pub and the bloke who owned the Kawasaki hung on to it. And you know why he did that? Because he’s making an insurance claim.’ Yates tapped the file. ‘Evidence, Charlie, sweet as you like. Two chains. Two sets of those nice forensic lab reports. Both of them admissible in court. And both of them tying you to the hit on the minister. We’re not greedy, Charlie. One conviction for murder will do us nicely though a cough on the Mallinder job would make our day. You’re a careful man, Charlie. You like things neat and tidy. Best to get it off your chest, eh? Before we start on Julie.’

There was a long silence. In the adjacent room Faraday heard the scrape of the door opening and looked round to find Suttle stepping in from the corridor. He’d just had another conversation with the SOC boys. Amongst the seized paperwork they’d located a receipt for the bolt cutters. Frank Greetham had bought them with a special staff discount from Gullifant’s in April 1992. No wonder the blades had been in a state.

‘How are we doing?’ Suttle nodded at the monitor screens.

‘Fine. Take a seat. The next bit might be interesting.’

Freeth was refusing to say anything. It was Dawn Ellis’s turn to put the questions. She wanted to know more about Freeth’s interest in moving house.

‘I have the SOC log here, Mr Freeth.’ She ducked her head. ‘Like Bev explained, they seized some paperwork of yours this afternoon. It seems you were negotiating to buy a property in …’ she looked up. ‘… Tullaghaught?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Did you intend to live there?’

‘We do, yes.’

‘Permanently?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what about Positivo? All your work with kids?’

‘It’s over. Done.’

‘How come?’

‘It’s a funding issue. The way things are these days, I’d be spending all my time raising money. That’s not why I set the thing up. Not at all. Julie feels the same way. Education’s a joke in this country. She can’t wait to be shot of it.’

‘Just the two of you then? In Tullaghaught?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No Dermott?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘But you do, Mr Freeth, you do. We can evidence your interest in the boy. We can evidence the meet you’d set up in Fishguard. We can prove your intention to move to Ireland, to set up home, to start a new life. Are you really telling me there wasn’t room for young Dermott in all that?’

Freeth was staring at the wall, refusing to take this line of questioning any further. Faraday noticed the whiteness of his knuckles on the table. Yates was much closer.

‘You never had kids of your own, Charlie,’ he murmured. ‘How come?’

Freeth’s eyes found Yates. Then Ellis.

‘You wouldn’t,’ he said at length. ‘Not in this world, you wouldn’t. Not in this fucking country, the way it is, the way it’s heading. We’ve lost it, totally blown it, and if we’re talking evidence I can give you a hundred names, a thousand, and all of them kids. Kids from broken homes. Kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Kids who never asked to be born. Kids who find themselves up to their necks in the fucking swamp we’ve made for them. No order. No routine. No direction. Not the first bloody clue who they are. And you know why they end up that way? Because we’ve failed them. Totally. Because we’re gutless. Because we’ve let ourselves become obsessed by money, and gain, and all the other shit. Because we’ve given up on decency and graft, and listening to each other, and trying to make an honest living. Because we lie on our backs and spread our legs and let a queue of arseholes have their way. Kids know that. They see it every day. And that’s important because the people who get
really
fucked are them, not us. In our sad little lives we think we can take care of it. Kids can’t. Won’t. And you know what? I’m not sure I blame them.’

There was a long silence. Suttle, watching, mimed applause. Then Ellis bent forward.

‘Arseholes like Mallinder?’ she queried. ‘Arseholes like the minister who wouldn’t do right by Frank?’

Freeth looked her in the eye. A ghost of a smile came and went.

‘No comment,’ he said softly.

 

Yates called a halt to the interview at 22.26. By now it was clear that Freeth’s cooperation was at an end. He was still denying every charge and refused point-blank to budge beyond a muttered ‘No comment’ when pressed for more information. His body language, though, told Faraday that he knew the game was probably up. This was a man who understood the slow, methodical assembly of evidence. He could measure the point beyond which the sheer weight of a case would persuade a jury. And as Freeth got wearily to his feet Faraday sensed that already he was preparing himself for the years to come. Being an ex-copper in a Cat A prison would never be easy.

Back at Kingston Crescent the lights were still burning in the Major Crimes Suite. Faraday had kept Martin Barrie abreast of developments during the evening. PACE regulations stipulated that Freeth should be freed by four in the morning. Now was the time to decide whether or not to formally charge him.

Barrie was in his office attending to a stack of paperwork. DCI Perry Madison sat at the conference table talking on his mobile. Barrie waved Faraday into a chair.

‘Well … ?’

Faraday summed up the case against Freeth. As far as
Polygon
was concerned, he’d established both motive and opportunity. Freeth had made no secret of his contempt for the political system that had, as he saw it, put Frank Greetham in his grave. The current Minister for Defence Procurement, in his former office, carried responsibility for Frank’s suicide, and Freeth, with his knowledge of firearms, was well qualified to settle that debt. His driving licence qualified him to ride a motorbike. He knew Pompey inside out. He was forensically aware. And when it came to an alibi for Monday the eleventh of September, he was relying, once again, on his partner. He’d spent the day at home with Julie. She’d been off school with a migraine. It happened a lot.

‘So where did he keep the bike?’

‘We don’t know, sir. It could have been that garage of his. It could have been anywhere.’

‘And you really think it was his partner on the back?’

‘I think it’s highly likely. We’ll be talking to her tomorrow morning.’

‘And the bolt cutters?

‘We’ll be submitting the two chains for analysis. I’d suggest another extension but I’m not sure that’ll do the trick.’

Application to the Magistrates’ Court would keep Freeth in custody for another thirty-six hours. A second application, a further twenty-four hours. But the labs might need longer than a couple of days to come up with a positive match between the two severed links.

Given a forensic result on the chains, Barrie was worried about tying the bolt cutters to Freeth. Faraday was more bullish.