Mulholland and Wyngate were both back in the interview room. It was two o’clock in the morning. Andrew Braithwaite looked as if a strong whisky might be welcome. Mulholland’s leg was strapped, he had refused to stay at the hospital and Wyngate had realized that he, nominally, was in charge.
‘I’m afraid Sally has been lying to you,’ Braithwaite said after listening to the recording.
Wyngate pushed across a cup of black coffee. ‘It looks like she’s not the only one.’
‘How is Colin? Is he doing OK?’
Mulholland looked at Wyngate.
‘No, not really. How long have you known him?’
‘About twenty-five years, but there was a twenty-year gap in the middle of that.’
‘He is on life support.’
‘Good God.’
‘His wife and children have been in to see him.’
‘Yes, I think Brenda has taken them back home, you know. It could go on for a long time,’ added Wyngate.
‘So, Mr Braithwaite. Andrew. You have heard what Sally had to say?’
‘Yes. Where is Sally just now? I mean, where?’
‘She is being taken care of, you know as well as I do what happens with bodies. There will be a post-mortem then we wait and see. O’Hare will try to hurry it through. Can you talk us through what happened on the roof?’
And he did, sobbing frequently. Wyngate began to get emotional, recalling the horror of the noise when she landed, the sickening thud. Mulholland called a halt to the proceedings, there and then. They might not have had a lot but they did have time.
Braithwaite’s story was a simple one. Sally must have bolted after hitting Anderson and had ran across the roof. Whether she meant to stop or whether she meant to jump was unclear to him, but he had caught her before she reached it, and she had pulled free leaving him carrying an empty sleeve. If only he had held on. And she had run away from him, tears blinding her, right to the rail, and went over.
‘She didn’t stop to think about it?’
‘I don’t know. How could I know? Oh God, what am I supposed to do without her?’
‘Do you want a fresh cup of coffee?’
Wyngate went out the room, and saw, to his surprise, that the ACC was behind the glass.
‘Once you get his statement, let him go,’ said Mitchum.
‘Let him go?’ Wyngate was incredulous.
‘He is guilty of many things but not murder. And he has just lost his wife.’
‘But Sally said on the tape that she only brokers deals. Then we have a dead girl. And an abducted—’
‘I know what she said, but then she flung herself off a roof and innocent people tend not to do that,’ said Mitchum, reinforcing his thoughts with a tone of authority.
‘Is that the right thing to do, sir?’ Wyngate said, then remembered who he was talking to. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘We need to let him go, we need to investigate further. Process him then release him. He has other things to attend to. And so do we. I know you are rudderless at the moment with Anderson in intensive care and Costello at the hospital, so you can take it from me, in my capacity as the most senior police officer. Now get on with making the coffee and get one for me while you are at it.’
Noakes had been going through the gym, room by room. They had found Miss Bluecoat and she had been removed from the premises in the middle of the night and he was finishing that corridor, opening doors, looking in cupboards, finding, he suspected, the instruments of an abortionist. He was at a walk-in linen cupboard, marked ‘clean (not sterile)’ and he rummaged around in the shelves of fluffy blue towels and folded dressing gowns. At the bottom, at the back, was the folded body of a woman. He called for assistance as he placed a finger on her neck, feeling a faint pulse. She was curled into the corner, her head down as if she had been sheltering or hiding from her attacker. Her knees were drawn up, her hair down and lying over her face. Only a sliver of her cheek was visible, it was deep purple and swollen. He could see a ligature round her neck, narrow, brown, deep into the skin of her neck, leaving it white and puckered. There were slight traces of blood on the hands that were pulled up in front of her face. When had she realized it was all going wrong? Had she started praying?
He knelt down, getting closer, hearing a conversation in the gym, help was coming. He tried to see behind her fingernails, had she scratched her assailant. He shone his torch on the chain round her neck, slight and silver with a butterfly clasp at the front, around which was attached some dark hair. It didn’t look like the woman’s straight dark hair, this was more like fluffy wool.
Black fluffy wool. He’d make sure that the preservation of evidence was at the forefront of the mind of any medical assistance.
It was a question more often asked in jest than in legal history: did she fall or was she pushed? And there were many factors to be considered before any definitive answer could be reached. The height, weight and momentum of the victim as they went over the top and the horizontal distance they landed from the drop point.
Professor O’Hare knew a whole team of people with very accurate computer algorithms who worked that kind of thing out, but so far all he knew was here in front of him in the form of a forty-three-year-old female, white, slim but well-nourished with good muscle tone. There was evidence of some surgery on her right knee which was not recent and old scarring to her right shoulder. He knew from palpating the rib cage and the skull that there was a lot of internal damage, her ribs compressed easily and with a familiar scrunch that showed the bony cage was no longer intact. A large part of her parietal bone had moved and disrupted the brain tissue underneath which was commonly found when impacting concrete at speed. She had probably died when she hit the tarmac. There had been no time for her to bleed out, although the blood in her spleen and her liver at the time of impact had flooded into her abdominal cavity, all of which was fairly typical. He didn’t need to wait for the toxicology results, he had eyewitness evidence that Sally had consumed a few glasses of wine and brandy but that she was not drunk. With her rather low body weight it would have been enough to upset her balance. Experience told him that it was odds on that she was pushed, experience and the deep red abrasion she had on the side of her pelvis. He had looked at the photographs of the rooftop terrace. Sally was fit so she would have gained speed and gathered momentum but as she came to the rail she would have put her hands out to stop her. It was one of those infallible human instincts and even if that hadn’t stopped her, the rail would have hit the front of her pelvis and in someone so slim that would have been metal on bone, but there was no evidence of that. The evidence was at the side like someone who had stopped and half-turned to face their pursuer, maybe to fight back or plead for their life. It was not for him to speculate. The certainty was that the rail had caught her on the hip under her centre of gravity and one small nudge to the upper body would have sent her over. He knew before any of Mathilda’s staff ran their computer program that she would have landed relatively close to the side of the building. And that meant she was murdered. Then he remembered he wasn’t allowed to have a professional opinion nowadays, it had to be backed up by a boffin staring at a screen, so he got on with his job, selecting his scalpel, ensuring the recording device was picking up his dictation, and he started with the Y incision.
Braithwaite nodded, a silent thank you for the coffee. ‘I heard what she said on the recording and she is not being entirely truthful. And yes, I have lied all the way through this. You need to understand that I love … loved Sally. I love the ground that she walks on and, well, she is, was, vulnerable, more vulnerable than you might think. She needed money, she needed money because of me.’
‘Why?’
‘I like to gamble but I am not very good at it. You know that the billionaire Joe Aspinall had a selection of busts made from marble. He called them The Great Gamblers. That kind of gambling is admirable, fearless and it’s in my nature. I will gamble on anything, even my career. I like to win, I lose with a degree of philosophy.’
‘And Sally?’
‘Sally didn’t lose the baby that resulted from the rape. She sold it, that part of what she said is absolutely true.’
Mulholland leaned forward in his chair. ‘Sold it?’
‘It wasn’t like that. A friend, a good friend had been trying for a baby for years. Nothing happened. They tried to adopt and that didn’t work. They were offered a child that was older, but she wanted a child to be seen to be her own, so the two women came to some arrangement, like a surrogate. Sally, three months pregnant, the other woman announced she was pregnant, and the two pregnancies – the real one and the false one – went along hand in hand until the day came and the baby was born. Abby went home with a new baby girl and Sally got money to go back to uni and continue her studies. And I think she wanted to get back to Colin. There was always a wee spark of something there, you see. Even back in our uni days I used my medical knowledge to edge him out; it was me who helped her get fit, me who strapped her knee. And later she couldn’t get together with Colin because I knew. I knew what she had done, and that brought us close, and we have remained so ever since. I was bound to her because of my gambling and I needed her money, and she was bound to me because of her big dark secret. Then we heard Colin had joined the police, we knew he was bright, and we kept our distance.’
‘But continued the baby selling.’
‘Brokering, I tend to call it. And I trained as an obstetrician. It wasn’t difficult.’
‘And she gets the women through the gym, the Pilates, the yoga class?’
‘Yes, all fair, all above board. And she is the one who makes that initial conversation. It’s something women talk about. God, at one point, a woman came to the Pilates class believing that it was the class who had got her friend pregnant.’
‘It’s not legal.’
Braithwaite waved the objection aside. ‘It’s a floating loophole. That’s all it is, nobody gets hurt, and everybody gets looked after.’
‘I think Orla Sheridan might disagree with that.’
‘Sally became odd. I don’t know where she was that night we got drunk at my house. You need to find out what happened to Orla.’
‘We are getting to the bottom of it,’ assured Mulholland, rubbing his leg.
‘She was back in the Blue Neptune building on Wednesday. And I think you should be looking for a woman called Valerie Abernethy. She was there last night, I let her into the building. Sally might have harmed her, but if you could find her and make sure that she’s OK. Please.’
‘Do you know Valerie socially?’
‘Vaguely. She hinted that she wanted a child but would be considered unsuitable for adoption, her age was against her. I think it was one of those things that can surface in a women’s psyche. She was supposed to be investigating why, or how, a woman called Diane Speirs got pregnant. And that led her right to me. By sheer bad luck, Valerie knew Diane and knew that Diane had suffered bilateral ovarian cancer. Then it turned out Val wanted a child. I thought she was genuine but Sally thought she was investigating us. And I believe she was, at first—’ he took a sip of coffee – ‘but it resonated with her. Val saw the good in what we were doing and was going to let us be, as long as we gave her a baby.’
‘And what happened to Valerie?’
‘I don’t know. What did happen to Valerie?’
That was almost too glib. Braithwaite went on. ‘Sally was very suspicious of her, it all started going wrong in her head. So if something has happened to Valerie then …’ He shrugged and whispered, ‘I think Sally killed Orla. I don’t know when or how but Orla wanted more money. There was another girl, Sonja. They had found out about each other and seemed to think they had hit on a gravy train if they gently blackmailed us, threatening us. No way Sally was going to have that.’
‘Sholto? What happened to Sholto?’
‘I have no idea, honestly, I have no idea.’
‘Are you telling us that Sally killed these women, not you?’
‘Yes. On the night Orla was murdered, Colin Anderson was out at my house, getting blind drunk on the sofa.’ He rubbed his face, as if trying to erase the tiredness. ‘I had difficulty walking never mind driving. Sally took a very long time to come home from work that night. And Colin Anderson knows that, so I hope to god he pulls through. He’s my alibi.’