The journey down to Hove was quite straightforward, and if he was honest, Ramouter was glad to get out of the office. The intense feeling of the SCU, and Henley, were making him feel claustrophobic.
As he stepped out of the car in front of the Elysium Clinic, he had to admit that the coastal air felt different. For the first time since he’d left Bradford and the pressures of looking after a wife amid her denial of early onset dementia, he could breathe.
The reception area looked as though it belonged to a spa hotel, with expensive-looking white sofas and armchairs in front of a large bay window that looked out to the sea. It was a far cry from the public rehab centre where Sean Delaney had worked.
‘Good afternoon. Can I help you?’ said the woman behind the reception desk.
‘Hi. I’m Detective Ramouter.’ He didn’t feel the need to tell her that he was still a few months away from being signed off as a fully-fledged detective. ‘I’m here to see one of your patients.’
The red-lipsticked smile on the receptionist’s face quickly disappeared as she looked at Ramouter’s warrant card.
‘Do you have an appointment? We pride ourselves on confidentiality. We just can’t have anyone walking in.’
Ramouter straightened himself up. Maybe he didn’t say the word ‘detective’ loud enough. Henley wouldn’t have this, he said to himself. She never had to say much to get what she wanted. She had an authoritative presence about her, something that they didn’t teach you in police training.
‘As I said, I’m Detective Ramouter and I want to speak to Leon Merrick.’
‘We get a lot of journalists coming in here, pretending to be family, friends and—’
‘Look, do you want my boss to call your boss? Believe me, I doubt that would be a good thing for either of us. I’ve shown you my warrant card. I’ve told you who I am. I know that Leon Merrick is here. I want to see him now.’
The receptionist looked down at her computer. After what seemed like the longest minute in Ramouter’s life, she said, ‘He has a group therapy session which is finishing in about fifteen minutes. I’ll have someone take to you to one of the visitors’ lounges. Would you like a tea or coffee while you wait?’
Ramouter had to stop himself from asking if he should take off his shoes when he was led into the visitors’ lounge by another member of staff. He had just eaten his second shortbread biscuit when a tall dark-haired man walked into the room. His collarbone stuck out sharply as he extended his hand.
‘I’m Leon,’ he said with a smile, revealing teeth that had been chipped and stained by a crack pipe.
‘How are you?’ Ramouter asked, his eyes following the track marks and yellowing bruises on Leon’s arm.
‘Doing OK.’ Leon sank into an armchair.
‘Anyway, Leon, I’m not going to take up a lot of your time.’
‘Nah, it’s fine, mate. My options this afternoon are yoga, mindfulness or Reiki.’ Leon screwed up his face. ‘Not even a trip down to the pier. Apparently, I’m not ready for that yet. Have you caught him, the person who killed Sean?’
Ramouter shook his head.
‘He was nice, you know. Decent. Not patronising like a lot of them. He actually cared. He didn’t deserve to die like that.’
‘I wanted to ask you some more questions about that night. I thought that things might be a bit clearer now that you’re…’
‘Not as high as a NASA spaceship. What do you want to know?’
Ramouter took out his notebook and flicked through the pages. ‘You said that you got to the centre about eight.’
‘It might have been later than that because I remembered that I sat in the pub for a bit and the football was on. Sunday night. It must have been Spanish footie. Seven thirty kick-off and I left when it finished, so it must have been around 9.30 p.m.’
‘And you went straight to the centre?’
‘Yeah. I was clucking and when that happens you get one thought in your head and you just focus on that. I remembered thinking that I needed to see Sean because he would help me. Sometimes… I mean… He’s not supposed to, but if he had it, he would have given me some methadone, to take the edge off. Calm me down.’
‘What time does the centre usually close?’
‘Officially, nine.’
‘Even on a Sunday?’
‘They have group therapy sessions. If you’re really lucky you might get a jammy dodger and a cup of tea. Not like this place. Every posh herbal tea known to man and pastries that no one eats.’
Ramouter looked down at his own cup of tea next to the bone china teapot.
‘Anyway,’ Leon continued as he picked up a biscuit from the plate. ‘I remember walking past and the light was still on.’
‘How do you get into the centre?’
‘You have to be buzzed in. They’ve got one of those intercoms with the security camera on the front and then there’s an emergency exit at the back. I think that it’s supposed to be the fire escape.’
‘Were you buzzed in?’
Leon leaned back as he chewed on his biscuit. ‘Couldn’t have been, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone around the back.’
‘What made you go to the back?’
‘Sean smokes. Usually out the back by the car park. I went to the back, saw his motorbike was there and then I saw the ambulance car thing.’
‘And it was definitely an ambulance?’
‘Yeah. Not a big one but like I told you on the phone, one of those car ones.’
‘Too much to ask if you could remember the number plate?’
‘Ha, chance would be a fine thing. The car door was open and my crazy head thought that someone might help me or that there might be drugs in there.’
‘You said last time that you saw a man in the back of the car?’
‘Yeah, I did. He was slumped down. I couldn’t see his face. He was at a funny angle and the man was putting his legs in.’
‘Is there anything that you can remember about the man in the back seat?’
‘Like I said, I think that it was Sean, but I couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure.’
‘What about the man? You spoke to him?’
‘Yeah, but he shoved me out of the way.’
‘Can you describe him?’
There was silence, occasionally filled by the sounds of seagulls flying by and Leon munching on a biscuit.
‘White. A little bit shorter than me, and I’m six feet three, so he was at least six feet. He was wearing dark clothes. Could have been green. Trainers, I remember that. Dark hair, short. He was bigger than me but not as big as you.’
‘I didn’t think that I was that big,’ Ramouter said with a grin.
‘No, you’re not. He was just between the two of us. Put it this way, if he was a boxer, he would be a light middleweight.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Broken nose. Well, it looked disjointed to me. Stubble.’
‘I want you to take a look at these photographs,’ said Ramouter. ‘Can you see the man who was in the car park of the drug centre on 8 September 2019 at around 9.30 p.m.?’ He pushed aside the bone china tea set and the plate of posh biscuits and fanned the photographs across the table. He had printed off photographs of twelve other men who had volunteered to have their images taken and used in an ID parade and had mixed them up with the photos that Henley had given him. ‘Take your time.’
Leon kneeled down and inspected the pictures.
‘Not him, not him, not him,’ Leon picked up three of the photographs and put them on the floor.
‘This one,’ Leon said, picking up a photograph and handing it to Ramouter.
‘Are you sure?’ Ramouter took the photograph of Dominic Pine from Leon’s shaking hand.
‘I’d put money on it. Definitely.’
‘That’s the man you saw in the car park?’
‘A hundred per cent.’
Ramouter had been thinking about getting fish and chips and eating it on the pier before heading back to London, but as he put the photographs in his pocket, he found he had lost his appetite.