‘He did?’ Fran made no effort to withhold her incredulity. ‘Patrick Burgess?’
Sinclair nodded earnestly, looking to his legal team for the belief that neither Fran nor Harper were demonstrating.
‘Burgess visited you in prison,’ said Harper. ‘How many times? How did you know him?’
‘Once. And I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t know him?’
Sinclair’s excitement dimmed. ‘Believe it or not, Detective Inspector, I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with visitors after you put me inside. My family still won’t talk to me. So-called friends, either. So when Burgess wrote to Miranda, my barrister, offering moral support and requesting a visit, I was glad of the company. Or so I thought.’
Harper’s face was heavy with scepticism. ‘And?’
‘At first he just seemed harmless. Saying he felt sorry for me. He believed I was innocent. Said he was praying for me. That the police had made a scandalous mistake.’
‘So he was delusional,’ scoffed Fran.
Sinclair rolled his eyes in irritation. ‘He seemed kind. I needed a friend. But then … he switched. He started talking about poor Leah, Leah Willoughby; calling her names. Nasty stuff. Slut and bitch, that sort of thing. Prancing whore.’
Stark looked up sharply, but when Fran glanced at him to explain he shook his head.
‘You have to believe me,’ Sinclair insisted. ‘I told him to get out and never come back, but I didn’t know what he really was. The prison will verify, he never visited again. But when he turned up this morning, saying he could prove me innocent once and for all … I had to hear him out.’
‘So what did he say?’ Harper was gruff-voiced, losing patience.
‘To start with it was niceties … Was I feeling better? When was I getting out? To be honest, he still creeped me out, so I told him my arm was fine and I was going home today; I didn’t want him visiting again. I asked him how he could prove my innocence and he sort of laughed … strangely. Then he just said it was him. All along. He started talking about retribution, angelic voices telling him to do it all, but now I was free he wanted me to know he was sorry for letting me take the blame.’
‘And you can verify this?’ Harper asked Bosch.
‘No. He would only talk to Julian.’
Harper huffed. ‘So some nutcase walks in here and proves you innocent by confessing to your crimes to you and you alone?’
‘He knew stuff,’ protested Sinclair. ‘Details … from the trial. Stuff that wasn’t in the papers.’
‘So get him back in here and he can tell us too.’
‘He left no means of contacting him,’ said Bosch, with his closest approximation of regret.
‘Why didn’t you call out to my colleagues outside, to detain him?’
‘He showed me his gun,’ explained Sinclair as if it should be obvious. ‘Said he’d kill me if I called out, and your colleagues too.’ He saw Fran and Harper’s expressions and tried appealing to Stark instead, initial cheer trampled into desperation. ‘I know they won’t believe me, but you … you’re new, you’re less invested …’ in my continued stitch-up, he didn’t quite need to add. ‘Please. I’m telling the truth,’ he pleaded, near to tears.
Fran had insisted he was a practised liar and the evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, still pointed strongly to him. But if this was a performance, it was a good one. ‘Can you describe the gun?’
Sinclair looked incredulous. ‘Black?’
‘A pistol?’
‘Yes.’
‘If I showed you images, might you recognize one?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Why does it matter?’
‘Everything matters,’ said Harper impatiently.
‘So you’ll investigate, fully?’ Bosch demanded.
Harper paused. For all his deficiencies, he had gravitas. ‘Rest assured, we’ll give this all the attention it deserves.’
‘We can’t ignore it,’ said Stark once they were outside.
‘Well of course we can’t,’ snapped Fran. ‘That’s why he said it!
‘He’s playing us,’ agreed Harper.
‘Maybe,’ Stark conceded. ‘Didn’t seem like that, though.’
Fran gave him a hard look. ‘Say that again when you’ve spent as much time with him as we have. It didn’t seem like that, but it never does. He’s a liar and a psychopath, and if he can turn on the waterworks it’s because he’s practised in a mirror.’
‘Sarge.’ Stark gave her his noncommittal blank face.
For a man who’d been blown up and shot more than once, he retained a disturbing faith in his fellow man. ‘So what was it made your ears prick up in there that you didn’t want to say?’ she asked.
‘Prancing whore,’ he explained. ‘That phrase was used in one of his fan mails.’
Fran huffed. ‘He’s a clever one, I’ll give him that. Trying to sow plausible doubt, painting this Burgess patsy. He’s probably got them all in a scrapbook.’
‘Or passed them straight to his sharks for litigation ammunition,’ muttered Harper.
‘Not this one,’ said Stark. ‘The nastiest offering. Original sin misogyny, holy retribution, the works. Sinclair only got a copy. Original was passed to National Crime but Forensics came up blank – simply styled on generic paper with a common printer, and no DNA to trace the author. But now we have a name.’
Fran rolled her eyes, but sighed. ‘Okay, let’s get a face. Check the hospital CCTV.’
‘He was wearing a cap,’ said Dearing, shaking his head bitterly. ‘He didn’t have any ID but Bosch insisted Sinclair knew him.’ The normally implacable sergeant glanced at his rookie, embarrassed and angry with himself at not searching for weapons. And so he should be.
Harper ignored him, stepping away to dial his phone. ‘John. It’s Owen. I need you to run a name … Patrick Burgess. Early to late thirties, Caucasian, sub-six foot, brown hair, brown eyes, brown beard … Check if we have anything on him.’
‘I’ll call HMP Belmarsh too,’ said Stark. ‘See if they have photo ID for him.’
‘And CCTV, if they store footage long enough,’ said Fran. ‘I’m sure your new BFF, Governor Grainger, will be only too happy to let you rummage through her drawers.’
‘Technically, army reservist Colonel Grainger could still order me to run parade ground laps in my boxers.’
‘I don’t know which mental image scars me more.’
‘Don’t worry, Sarge, I only take orders from you.’
‘If only that were half true. You take orders – it’s what you do with them afterward that bothers me.’