There was a change in atmosphere at South Yorkshire Police HQ. Matilda felt it the moment she opened the door and walked in. People were subdued, walking along corridors with their heads down, talking in hushed tones, falling completely silent when anyone approached them. As Matilda approached the HMET suite and saw several members of her team hunched over newspapers at their desks, she realised why. Danny Hanson had written the story about Aaron Connolly. She immediately felt sorry for the detective sergeant she had known, respected, and admired for years. There was nothing she could have done about the story getting out. She pushed open the glass doors and walked in.
‘Is this true?’ Rory said, looking up.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘I can’t believe it. I always thought he and Katrina were so happy.’
‘Let me give you some advice about men, Rory, that perhaps your mum didn’t tell you when you were growing up. They have two brains. One inside their head, and the other in their pants. The one in their pants often talks louder than the one in their head. Unfortunately, listening to that one gets them into a whole lot of trouble.’ She patted him on the back as she headed for her office.
‘Is he off the team?’ Rory called after her.
She stopped and looked back. Others were looking at her for the answer. She nodded. ‘Look, Aaron is a great guy and a brilliant detective. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t continue in his career. I hope this so-called news story blows over quickly. I also hope Aaron and Katrina are able to sort out their differences. In the meantime, Aaron is still our colleague. If I hear any jokes, snide remarks, or see any evidence of you ostracising Aaron, you’ll have me to answer to. Is that clear?’ she said, addressing the whole room. There were slight nods of ascent. ‘Good. Now, we all have work to do and we’re a few members down. So, put those in the bin where they belong and do what you’re paid to do. Christian, a word.’
Christian closed his newspaper and slipped it into his drawer. He’d take it home for Jennifer to read later. She’d met Aaron and Katrina a few times and liked them. She’d be devastated.
‘I’d ask if you had a good weekend, but we didn’t really have one, did we?’ Christian said, entering her office and closing the door behind him.
‘Not really.’
‘So much for cutting back on overtime.’
‘I know. Valerie’s going to kill me when she comes back.’
‘Any news on when that will be?’
‘No. I’ll give her a call later. Now, late last night, I had a call from forensics. They’ve been through the three phones and the one found under Jodie’s bedroom floorboards. I want you to interview her with me.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘Because she’s a manipulator and I don’t want her getting her claws into an inexperienced DC. When she knows she’s up against a DCI and a DI, hopefully she’ll crumble.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought she was the type to crumble.’
‘She will be when she finds out what I know.’
***
In interview room one, with Finn and Rory in the observation room, Jodie was sitting at the table with her solicitor next to her and an appropriate adult to one side, keeping an eye on proceedings and making sure Jodie wasn’t too distressed by the questioning.
Jodie was wearing a navy tracksuit. Her hair was neatly tied back. She looked like she’d lost weight overnight, despite the duty sergeant telling Matilda she’d wolfed down her breakfast. Her eyes were sunken and surrounded by black circles. Had she suffered a sleepless night in a cell due to the remorse she was feeling for her actions, or was she one of the greatest actors never to grace the London stage? She hadn’t been told about her father’s death, yet. Matilda wanted to break that news herself.
Christian turned on the recording equipment and stated who was present while Matilda made herself comfortable and put the plastic box containing the evidence she was going to show Jodie on the floor beneath the table.
‘Jodie, before we begin, is there anything you would like to tell us about the deaths of your brother, sister, and mother?’ It pained Matilda to speak in a sympathetic tone. However, she wanted to surprise Jodie when the time was right.
‘No,’ Jodie said without looking up. Her head was down, her chin on her chest, acting the perfect victim.
‘Jodie, there is no easy way for me to say this: I’m afraid your father was found dead yesterday morning in Hillsborough Park. He hanged himself.’
Jodie didn’t move. Her face was hidden. All eyes were on her as she sniffled a few times. The appropriate adult stepped forward and offered her a tissue which she took. She wiped her eyes, but the tissue came away dry.
‘Are you all right? Would you like to have a break for five minutes?’ Matilda asked. She was pretending to play into her hands.
Jodie blew her nose loudly and looked up. She cleared her throat. ‘No. I’m fine.’
‘Ok. Any time you want to have a break, let me know,’ she smiled and gave the same mock-sympathetic smile to the solicitor whose face remained stoic.
‘Jodie, in searching your house yesterday, we found three mobile phones. All iPhone 4s which belonged to your father. Do you know why your dad had three mobiles?’
‘No,’ she replied with a catch in her throat.
‘For the benefit of the recording, I am showing Jodie the three phones.’ Matilda lifted all three phones from the box at her feet. They were in plastic evidence bags. She lined them up in front of the fourteen-year-old. ‘On one of them we found the numbers of your mum and other family members, and your father’s friends. The texts are as you’d expect, as are the photographs and internet history. The second phone is one he used for work-related purposes. This third one, however, only has one contact in the phone book and he seemed to use WhatsApp more than anything else. There’s one conversation that has been going on for a number of years in which your father appears to be having a very intimate relationship with someone who isn’t your mum. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the number assigned to anyone, so we don’t know who that person is. Can you shed any light on who it might be?’
‘No,’ she replied quickly.
Matilda pulled a cardboard file from the box. ‘We’ve printed off the conversation. It’s incredibly detailed and sexually explicit. Your father describes sexual activities he and this other person have done together, what he’d like to do in the future, and he’s even sent photographs of parts of his body.’
‘I don’t think my client would like to hear what her father has been getting up to, DCI Darke,’ the solicitor interrupted.
Matilda ignored her. ‘The receiver of these messages replied in a similar vein. At times, she’s even more explicit, and the photographs she sent of herself are, quite frankly, highly disturbing. There’s even a four-minute video of this person, though we can’t see her face.’
Jodie bit her bottom lip hard. Her eyes darted around the room. She was unable to look at Matilda.
‘Is any of this relevant?’ the solicitor asked.
‘Jodie, are you the person your father is messaging?’
‘No,’ she replied quietly.
Matilda brought out another phone from the box beneath the table. ‘I’m showing Jodie Armitage an iPhone 4S that was found in her bedroom under the floorboards by her bed. The carpet was loose there as if it had been pulled back many times. Do you recognise this phone?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. It looks like any other iPhone 4. It’s not mine. I’ve got an iPhone 8.’
‘How can you account for this phone being in your room, underneath your bed?’
‘Well, I can’t,’ she shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen it before.’
‘We’ve analysed this phone. There are no contacts saved but in WhatsApp is the other half of the conversation with your father that we found on this phone which was hidden under the floor in the living room.’
‘Maybe someone planted it there?’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. That’s your job to find out.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ Matilda leaned forward and picked up the phone. ‘Do you know what I love about these iPhones? They’re so smooth and sleek and shiny. You only need to pick it up once and you leave behind a perfect fingerprint. These are a godsend to police. We find these, dust them for prints, and we always get a good set from them. We dusted this one too. Would you like me to tell you what we found?’
Jodie sat back and folded her arms. She shrugged her reply.
‘We found your prints. Well, we only found one. It was a thumb print on the home button. As you know, we took your prints for elimination purposes. They’re a complete match to the one on this phone.’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’ve never touched that phone.’
‘You have. Looking at the times and dates of the messages sent you’ll have been in bed, chatting on the phone to your father in the next room and when you’ve sent your final message with three kisses and told him how much you loved him, you turned the phone off and hid it beneath the floorboards.’
‘No.’
‘Your mum slept downstairs in the extension with Riley. Your father was in bed upstairs on his own. Many times you started your messages with ‘Would you like me to come in?’ You volunteered to go into your dad’s room and engage in sexual activity.’
‘You have no proof of that,’ the solicitor said. ‘Even if it’s true, she could have suffered years of abuse at the hands of her father, making her seem complicit to avoid other physical abuse or abuse enacted towards her brother or sister.’
‘I’ll let you have a copy of this conversation, including the pictures we downloaded, and the short video. Did I tell you what the video was of?’ Matilda asked, a smile on her face. ‘It’s of a young woman, a girl, using a vibrator on herself. The message that went with it said, ‘Happy birthday, Daddy’. Care to explain?’
‘That wasn’t me,’ Jodie said, firmly.
‘I’m going to put in a request to have a doctor examine you, Jodie. That doctor will be able to tell if you match the person in the video. They can tell by any veins that appear prominently on the leg, or by moles or skin defects.’
‘It’s not me,’ she said, a little less confidently.
‘Yes, your father may have instigated the abuse, but you enjoyed it. He made you believe what you were doing was perfectly normal. He forced you to fall in love with him. Then, when he turned his attentions to Keeley, you killed her because you thought she was going to replace you.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘You wanted him for yourself so you poisoned your mother so it could be just the two of you.’
‘No.’
‘And you killed Riley so you could move away somewhere and start afresh. Father and daughter living as husband and wife.’
‘You’re seriously sick in the head.’
‘You’re the victim of abuse, but the perpetrator of three murders.’
‘Wrong. You’re so wrong it’s unbelievable.’
‘Then why is your thumb print on this phone?’
‘It isn’t because I always wiped—’ She fell silent.
Matilda savoured the silence. ‘You always wiped it before you put it back under the floorboards. Is that what you were going to say?’
Jodie slumped in her seat as if the life had been torn out of her. She looked down. Her breathing was slow. Eventually, she looked back up at Matilda.
‘You tricked me.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m not proud of that.’
A silence descended. Matilda waited for Jodie to begin in her own time.
Her bottom lip began to wobble. ‘I never thought what Dad was doing was abuse. He was always so gentle, so kind. He made me feel safe and wanted. When it started, it was just kissing and holding each other. The first time we had sex, I told him I wanted my first time to be special. We went for a meal, just the two of us. Keeley was staying over at a friend’s house and Mum was in the extension with Riley. She never came upstairs. We made love for hours. It was … amazing,’ she smiled as she recalled the memory. Her face was one of contentment, but tears began to run down her face.
‘You must have known it was wrong,’ Matilda said.
‘I did. I told Dad we shouldn’t be doing it, but he said you can’t help who you fall in love with. He’s right. We’re taught at school about being tolerant towards people from other lifestyles and religions. We watched a video and there was this man who hated being a man. He hated everything about being male and changed gender. Yet, when he was a woman, he still wanted to sleep with women, so he entered into a lesbian relationship. I remember some of the lads in my class laughing at that. And I thought, yes, it is a bit weird, but he looked so happy. I was sleeping with my dad, but I was happy, so, surely that’s all that matters … that I’m happy.’
Matilda and Christian exchanged glances. Everyone in that room felt uncomfortable. Suddenly, they weren’t sitting opposite a cold-blooded killer, but a victim of prolonged sexual and mental abuse.
‘You killed Keeley, didn’t you?’ Matilda asked, breaking the heavy silence.
Jodie lost her grip on her emotions. The tears fell in a torrent and she struggled to keep her breath. She refused the offer of a break.
‘When Keeley told me what Dad had done to her,’ she eventually began, ‘I thought he’d finish with me and go to Keeley. I loved him so much. I just wanted him for myself. I loved Keeley, but she was getting in the way of my happiness,’ she wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.
‘What happened on Monday evening?’
‘I bought Keeley an ice cream from the van outside the school. Then, when we went to the Co-op, I told her to wait there until she’d finished it, then go and wait for me in the woods and I’d bring her a treat. I told her not to speak to anyone. We’d have a little picnic, just the two of us. I quickly did the shopping, took it home, made some excuse to Mum about Keeley wandering off then went to look for her. I phoned Mum not long after I’d left and pretended to be a kidnapper. Then I went to find Keeley. She was there, waiting for me by the tree, drawing in the dry ground with a stick, acting all sweet and innocent as if she’d done nothing wrong.’
‘But she hadn’t done anything wrong,’ Matilda said.
‘You wouldn’t say that if you saw the way she flaunted herself around the house – dressing up like a princess, sitting on Dad’s knee. It made me sick. I had to get her out of the way.’
‘She was nine years old,’ Matilda exclaimed.
‘So? Don’t let someone’s age fool you. She knew exactly what she was doing.’
‘What did you do?’
Jodie picked up the plastic cup of water and took a lingering sip. ‘I smacked her over the head with a rock. It was easy. She didn’t scream. She just fell to the ground. She wasn’t dead though. I thought she was but suddenly she started to groan and squirm.’
‘Go on,’ Matilda prompted.
‘I strangled her,’ she said, matter-of-fact. ‘That’s harder to do than it looks in films. I made sure she was dead then I rolled her down the embankment. I came home and to tell Mum I couldn’t find her, but she was in tears thinking she’d been kidnapped. It was so easy.’
‘But why the fake kidnapping story?’ Matilda asked.
‘I have you to thank for that,’ Jodie smiled. ‘I knew you’d be leading the investigation; the great DCI Matilda Darke. I’ve read that book Carl’s mother wrote. I knew Keeley would turn up dead and the newspapers would see it as a kidnapping gone wrong. Then, all the attention would be on you for screwing up another kidnapping, and not me.’
Matilda couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How was it possible for such a sweet and innocent-looking fourteen-year-old to be so evil and manipulative?
‘Jodie, were you behind the photos of Keeley we found on her iPad?’ Matilda asked.
She smirked. ‘The ones of her in make-up and acting all sultry?’ Matilda nodded. ‘Of course I was. Who do you think did her hair and painted her face? She thought we were just having a fun day together, two sisters messing around. I put them online hoping some paedo would get a hard-on and snatch her off the streets. No such luck.’
‘My God!’ Christian said. He looked utterly disgusted.
‘And what about your mum?’
Jodie’s face hardened. ‘I hated Mum for what she did to Riley, for causing him such pain. When I was with him, playing with him, looking after him, feeding him, he’d look at me with his dead eyes and he’d be crying and yelling and I knew, I knew he was telling me how much pain he was in. He wasn’t living. He was just existing. He was trapped in his own body and he wanted to be set free.’
‘How long have you been poisoning her for?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t remember. A while.’
‘What have you been using?’
‘Botulinum Toxin.’
Matilda frowned. ‘What? Why? How did you even get hold of that? Wouldn’t something like rat poison have been quicker?’
‘Because I wanted it to be slow. I wanted her to suffer. She needed to know why she was dying. Have you seen the photos of Riley before she shook him? He was such a sweet baby, always smiling, always hugging. He was so cute. His eyes lit up when he saw me. After she tried to kill him, all that was gone. His eyes no longer sparkled. She’d ruined the most perfect little baby I’d ever seen. She had to suffer.’
‘Where did you get it from?’
‘Well, it wasn’t easy. I spent hours and hours on the internet trying to find it. Did you know that it’s the same thing they use in Botox injections? It was fascinating.’
‘Why did you kill Riley?’
‘I wasn’t planning on killing him. My plan was to finish school and then I’d be his full-time carer and look after him and Dad. We’d be a proper couple, a proper family. But then I started thinking … he’d get older, but he wouldn’t grow up. I pictured him as a twenty-year-old, strapped in a wheelchair, still laughing at Pingu. That image frightened me. Nobody should have to live like that. He didn’t suffer. I promise you he didn’t suffer. I waited until he was asleep, and I popped a little piece of cheese in his mouth. He always slept with his mouth open. He didn’t know what was happening.’ She fell onto the table, her head in her arms. ‘He never knew what was happening.’
Matilda’s heart ached as she watched and listened to a fourteen-year-old girl admitting to murdering her family. There was a little remorse there when she spoke of Riley’s death, but she knew the harm she had done to Keeley and her mother. Matilda was conflicted. Jodie had arrived here through years of abuse. Should she be labelled a cold-blooded killer or the victim of a perverted father?
***
‘I don’t think I’ve ever needed a drink more,’ Christian said as he and Matilda left the interview room. He slumped against the wall and let out a deep sigh.
‘Come on. I know where we can get one from.’
ACC Valerie Masterson always kept an emergency bottle of whiskey hidden in the depths of a filing cabinet for such situations.
The room was cold and empty. It seemed strange to enter it while Valerie wasn’t in the building. Matilda went straight to the bottom drawer and took out the half-filled bottle and two glasses. She blew into them to clean away the dust.
‘It feels naughty being in here while the head teacher is away,’ Christian said, reluctantly sitting down on the comfortable armchair.
‘Do you really see the ACC as a head teacher?’
‘Yes. Don’t you?’
She thought about it for a while and the many times she had cried on her shoulder. ‘Not really.’
Matilda poured them both a healthy measure and they drank in silence.
‘What will happen to Jodie?’ Christian asked once his glass was empty.
‘I’ve no idea. She certainly needs to be assessed by a psychologist. She’s suffered years of mental and sexual abuse by her father and that’s led to her killing three people and trying to kill Sian and Ellen.’ Matilda finished her drink and poured them both another. ‘You know, I went into that interview wanting to catch her out as the cold-hearted psycho bitch I thought she was.’
‘And now?’
‘Now, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more sympathy for anyone than I do her. I just hope she receives the treatment she needs and she’s able to recover.’
‘Do you mind if I go home early today? I wouldn’t mind spending a bit of time with my girls,’ Christian said.
‘No. Of course I don’t mind.’
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I need to go and see the Meagans and tell them the results of the DNA test. I’ve been sitting on them for too long.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘No. I’ll give Pat a call. She’ll be glad of an excuse to leave her husband in the garden centre on his own.’ Matilda stood up to leave. She placed a hand on Christian’s shoulder. ‘Christian, do me a favour. Go home, take your wife and daughters out for a nice meal, and be a normal boring family for the night.’
‘I can do that. I’m Mr Boring.’
She leaned down and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I wouldn’t have you any other way.’