My bum was already numb on the hard plastic seat I’d had to awkwardly scoot into since it was bolted to the floor, and my hands frozen. When we entered the prison, we surrendered our coats and all electronic devices. The only things I’d brought into the closed visit room were my notepad and pencil, which I tried not to tap against the table while we waited for Karl’s father.
‘He’s got a busy schedule,’ Juliet muttered as heavy footsteps finally rung out along the corridor. ‘A hectic morning of beating fellow inmates and staring at grey walls.’
This was an accurate representation of how Matthew Biss had spent his time since he’d been sentenced to life imprisonment for beating his wife to death and attempting the same with his son. His sentence had been gradually increased, the sheer amount of violent altercations he got into ensuring he would never be a free man again.
The door on the other side of the room slid open and I suppressed a shiver as Matthew entered, flanked by two prison officers. Juliet was unaffected by the fridge-like conditions. She watched, impassive and still, as our interviewee settled on the other side of the table, separated from us by a thick plastic screen.
Matthew’s greying hair was shorn close to his scalp and his body was broad and meaty. His freckled skin was further marked with overlapping tattoos, the words and symbols indecipherable. He sneered at the guards as they left, an expression I couldn’t imagine crossing Karl’s face.
Matthew’s upper lip curling, a scar down the left side of his face stretched as he examined us through the scratched plastic. Perhaps there was something of Karl in the dark brown of his eyes and what was once the long line of his nose but was now a misshapen lump.
‘Thank you for meeting with us, Mr Biss,’ I began, my back pressed firmly into the unyielding plastic seat. Even with the screen between us, I wanted distance from this man. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Gabe Martin and this is Detective Inspector Juliet Stern.’
Matthew’s bristly eyebrows rose. ‘What’s a couple of detectives doing, coming to chat with me?’
Here was a resemblance to Karl; he and his father’s voices rose and fell with the gentle cadence of Yorkshire. On Karl, the accent was soft and spoke of his placid nature. On his father, there was a harsh edge.
‘We have some questions about Karl,’ Juliet said, leaning forward to speak through the holes at the bottom of the screen.
While I wouldn’t have said Matthew was friendly before, he was at least open and curious. One mention of his son, and he closed down. He sat rigid, dark eyes narrowed.
‘What about him?’ His voice had hardened, the words clipped.
I tapped my pencil on my notepad. ‘We’re wondering what you can tell us, Mr Biss.’
He cringed. ‘You can stop with that formal shit. Call me Matt.’ He swallowed, grinding his stubbled jaw. ‘What do you want to know?’
Juliet leant forward, her elbows resting on the table. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had captured her interest. All reports had described Matthew Biss as an unrepentant monster. He’d killed his wife and tried to kill his son, and he’d refused to accept the blame. He’d then continued his streak of violence in this prison.
All of that didn’t fit with the reaction he’d had to his son’s name. He’d come into the room swaggering and cocky, but that thin armour had been knocked off.
‘Can you tell us about Karl’s childhood?’ Juliet asked.
I stopped tapping my pencil, preparing to take notes. We hadn’t planned a deep dive into Karl’s past, but I understood why Juliet had started there. I wanted to unpick why this hardened criminal had such an undeniable reaction to one of his victims.
Matthew’s eyes searched Juliet’s face. He found nothing threatening behind her encouraging smile. ‘He was a runty little thing. No good at sports, no help around the house. All he wanted to do was read. Wasn’t even interested in TV.’
‘Were you close?’ Juliet asked. We knew the answer, but this was one of the ways she lulled men like Matthew into revealing their darkest secrets. Play it dumb, let them talk, and then they’d slip up when she struck out. This was why she was taking the lead here, something I was happy to relinquish after my failure in every other aspect of this case.
Matthew shook his head. ‘Na. He was a strange lad. Course, his mam encouraged him.’
Absently, he rubbed his fingers over his knuckles. There was a thick tattoo across the back of his hand. I tilted my head to make a note, hiding my shock that Matthew had the name of the wife he’d murdered inked into his skin.
‘Were they close?’ Juliet asked.
‘Peas in a pod.’ There was a soft edge to his voice. ‘I never knew what she saw in me. I wasn’t smart like her. Or like him.’
‘What happened on the night you killed her?’
Matthew flinched. Juliet widened her eyes at me while he stared down at his hand, fingers rasping over the letters printed across his knuckles.
‘Matt, are you alright?’ I asked.
His hand stopped moving and he pinned me with his gaze. ‘Do you want to talk about it properly? Because no one else did. No one else gave me a chance.’
‘What do you mean?’
Matthew ground his teeth together. I tried not to shrink away, kept my expression neutral as my hand tightened around my pencil.
‘As soon as that little shit woke up and started shouting his mouth off, no one listened to me,’ he spat out.
I eased my grip. ‘We want to hear your version of events.’
His eyes grew round. ‘You do?’
I pressed the tip of my pencil into my notepad. ‘Please. In your own time.’
Matthew tipped his head towards the ceiling, his broad chest expanding as he breathed deeply. His eyes slammed to mine as he sat forward.
‘Like I said, he was a strange child.’ His words rushed over one another in his eagerness to tell a story he’d been refused a listening ear for. ‘I tried not to let what I knew cloud how I treated him, but he was a weird one.’
‘What did you know?’ Juliet interjected.
Matthew’s eyes darted to her but landed on my pencil and notepad. ‘He wasn’t mine.’
There was a triumphant sheen to his whole being as I noted that down. ‘Not yours?’ I clarified, my heart thrumming.
‘Jenny was up the duff when I met her,’ Matthew rushed on. ‘Didn’t bother me. She was a beauty, the most wonderful woman I’d ever met. Didn’t matter to me that she was having some other bloke’s kid. I was happy to help her raise it.’ His expression soured. ‘It mattered to him, though.’
‘Karl?’ Juliet checked.
Matthew nodded, apparently unwilling to say the name. ‘We didn’t tell him, even put me on the birth certificate.’
That was remarkably accepting. I tried to reconcile a man who would willingly parent another’s child with the one sat before me.
‘How did Karl find out?’ I tried to keep the jumpy energy filling me from my voice. If this was true, it had to mean something.
‘No idea.’ Matthew rubbed his knuckles again. ‘I came home after work and he was screaming at Jenny. Said he hated her, had always hated me. He went on and on about how we’d lied and how he could have had a better life. In the end, he ran out of steam and scarpered to his room.’
Shadows shifted across Matthew’s face as he looked towards the bar covered window. ‘At least, that’s where I assumed he went. I made sure Jen was okay, she always hated it when Karl shouted, and then I went for a shower.’ He turned from the window, a pleading edge entering his voice. ‘I worked at a garage, always came home covered in muck.’
‘Where had Karl gone?’ Juliet urged. It wouldn’t be obvious to Matthew, but I could hear the echo of my own eagerness in her question. In a case full of lies and confusion, we hadn’t expected even more here. Potentially, we’d uncovered a secret we hadn’t known to search for.
‘He went to the garden shed,’ Matthew said in a low monotone. ‘He found an old set of golf clubs one of my mates gave me. I’d never used them, had half-forgotten they were there.’
He tailed off, his fingers rubbing harshly over his knuckles.
We’d read the official report of what happened next. Matthew beat his wife to death, then tried to kill Karl. Police arrived in time to stop him causing fatal injury to two members of his family. It was the story that made me liken Karl to myself.
‘He brought the club in, and he killed her.’ Matthew paused, working his jaw. ‘I was getting dressed when I heard the screams. Then they stopped. He was still beating her when I ran into the kitchen.’
I swallowed hard as my hand flew across my notepad. This was not the story fed to the jury, was not what the world believed happened on the day Jennifer Biss was killed.
‘What did you do then?’ Juliet asked.
‘I tried to stop him.’ Matthew’s hands shook as his fingers moved compulsively over the tattoo. ‘I didn’t know Jenny was gone, thought I could save her. I pushed him away, but the little shit kept coming back. He attacked me, and I threw him off. Grabbed the club from his hands.’
‘You hit him with it?’ Juliet prompted.
I examined Matthew’s face as he formulated an answer, the first time he’d fumbled in his account of what happened that night. I suppressed a shiver as his eyes darted between us.
‘I did,’ he admitted. ‘He wouldn’t stop coming at me. Once I had the club, I made him stay down. I needed him to stop so that I could help Jenny. But the police arrived before I could get to her.’
‘You only hit Karl to subdue him?’ Juliet checked.
Matthew glared at her, taking longer than needed to answer. ‘Yes.’
I hadn’t been sure about his story, but now I knew I was looking at a liar.
‘Karl’s injuries were so severe that he didn’t regain consciousness until he’d been in hospital for several hours,’ I said. ‘He was beaten so badly that he had to have physiotherapy for weeks to regain full use of his hands. He had to relearn how to walk, how to eat and talk. All while you barely sustained a scratch.’
‘He wouldn’t stop coming at me,’ Matthew repeated, his hands clenching into fists. ‘I only hit him to stop him.’
We’d read the medical reports. Matthew beat Karl with that club far beyond the point of simply stopping him. He’d wanted to kill Karl, just like he’d killed his wife.
Juliet took a deep breath, rolling her shoulders. ‘Let me get this straight. You were happy to raise another man’s son, even if he was odd. Then Karl found out about this monumental lie, and he murdered his own mother?’
Matthew’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s what happened.’
I doubted that. We’d look into Matthew’s claims that he and Karl weren’t related, but this visit had been a monumental waste of time.
‘Why didn’t you say any of this before?’ Juliet asked, her face pinched. ‘You pleaded not guilty, but you didn’t put forward an alternative timeline.’
‘I was grieving.’ Matthew’s eyes settled on me. ‘I couldn’t believe what had happened. Before I knew it, I was on trial and everyone was telling me I’d killed Jenny. My solicitor told me to plead guilty, but I couldn’t do it. I knew no one would listen, that little shit had everyone too far wrapped up in his pathetic lies.’
‘And the years since?’ Juliet tipped her head to the side. ‘You never tried to tell the truth?’
Matthew didn’t look at her, continued drilling me with his gaze. He might have sensed the waves of disbelief crashing off Juliet even through the screen. He couldn’t know I’d seen through his lies too.
‘I know who I am.’ He spread his hands wide, the palms free of blurred ink. ‘I know how it looks. I was an angry man before I came in here, and it’s only gotten worse. You’ve got a kid saying the big, bad bastard killed his mam, and then you’ve got me, trying to pin the blame on some innocent flower. How’s that going to go?’
Exactly the way it went. ‘Do you have any idea who Karl’s biological father is?’ I asked.
Matthew clasped his hands together. ‘No idea. Jenny said she didn’t know.’
Having met both Karl and Matthew, I knew who I was more inclined to believe. Matthew’s story had gaping holes he couldn’t fill. I had no doubt he’d found out about Karl’s parentage the same day Jennifer died. It made no sense that this man wouldn’t speak up when falsely accused, and his violent record spoke for itself. He hadn’t had darkness thrust on him, he’d gathered it into himself.
‘Karl is a suspect in a murder case,’ Juliet stated. ‘He’s absconded. Any idea where he could be hiding?’
Matthew sighed. ‘Done it again, has he?’
I bit the inside of my cheek. Matthew really wanted us to believe Karl was a killer. His lies made little sense. He wouldn’t get out of here even if he was acquitted of Jennifer’s murder. He was throwing muck at Karl out of pure spite.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘We didn’t have much money, so we didn’t go on holidays or nothing. Me and Jen were only children, our parents are dead.’ Matthew shrugged. ‘He’s got no one he could run to.’
I flicked my notepad shut rather than rubbing at the dull ache his words elicited in my chest.
‘That everything?’ Juliet checked with me, before pressing a button to summon the prison officers. ‘Thank you for your time,’ she said to Matthew, standing gracefully.
I engaged in an awkward dismount, not unmissed by Matthew if the sneer on his face was anything to go by. Juliet swept out of the room when the officers appeared, stalking towards the locked reception.
‘Do you believe a word of it?’ she asked, while an officer in the room beyond fiddled with the controls to free us.
‘No.’ I followed her into the reception area and over to a bank of lockers. ‘But we have to investigate it. He could have been lying about who killed Jennifer but be telling the truth about not being Karl’s biological father.’
Juliet shrugged on her coat. ‘Would Karl’s parentage make a difference if he didn’t kill his mother? It wouldn’t be proof of a violent past, just messy family history.’
I huddled into my coat. Juliet was already absorbed in her phone as I signed us out. As we walked across the vast car park, I turned over the interview in my head. There were too many holes in Matthew’s story. He wasn’t the kind of man anyone would think was innocent, and for good reason, but I couldn’t see why he would lie about Karl’s parentage. It was too easy to prove.
I unlocked the car and set up the satnav to take us back to the station, dread sinking into my barely warmed limbs. I hadn’t held out much hope that Karl’s dad would throw a curveball at us that would sustain this case, but part of me had been clinging to the possibility. Instead, all he’d done was point the finger at a man we couldn’t question even if we’d wanted to. I’d investigate his claims about Karl’s parentage, but the likelihood it would have anything to do with Melanie’s death was wafer thin.
We’d talk to Dunlow, but he wasn’t about to hand us a signed confession. This case was finished. I’d failed not only to lead well but, more importantly, to find justice for Melanie.