Sergeant White passed the news on as Dan walked in through the station door. Jamie May had been apprehended by PC Singh just before the notice for his arrest had gone out. White had arranged for the boy’s mother to be brought to the station and the duty solicitor had been contacted.
Dan nodded, pleased that they at least had one suspect in custody. He wanted to be off again to catch up with Miles Westlake, but they all needed a re-cap, especially in the light of Claire Quick’s statement.
Having gleaned the story of the arrest of Jamie May from the two beat officers, Gould stopped Dan in the main corridor. ‘D’you know, Daniel, my boy,’ he said, ‘that girl Singh is an asset to this force. Why don’t we steal her for a couple of days? She knows the kids and the area and she’s not scared of getting stuck in and doing what needs to be done.’
Dan agreed. They could do with a little local knowledge, and PC Singh seemed willing and keen. He rang Colin White and gave him the bad news, he would be one uniform down for the rest of the week.
‘Do all these gung-ho women make you feel a bit inadequate, Ian?’ Dan asked, as they headed for the incident room.
‘You have no idea,’ Gould replied, raising his eyes towards Julie Oliver in her top floor office.
Sally Ellis and Bill Larcombe were busy with the Mind Map on the wall. Bill had spent all morning re-doing it. The picture of Carly was at the centre. He had used colours to represent the different people involved with her. Sally was writing up the main headings from the Braithwaite meetings. Dan passed on the Abrams interview tape to Ben Bennett who didn’t take long to transcribe it.
Dan stood and stared at the wall, wolfing a tuna sandwich and slurping from a mug of surprisingly good coffee. He raised the mug in a salute to Sally who had thrown out the old stuff and started again from scratch. He stepped forward and added the information he had gained from Claire Quick to the board, then stood back.
He was looking for a pattern that just wasn’t there.
Maybe Jamie May was the killer. Perhaps Claire Quick was right about jealousy being the motive. But surely he would have killed Miles Westlake, not Carly? Or maybe that was why he was at the teacher’s house yesterday? Finishing the job. Was Alan Braithwaite just a grieving father, or did his argument with Jamie May earlier that day mean something?
And how did Jed Abrams fit in? Or was he just a distraction? Should he pass their suspicions about Abrams straight onto Vice and let them deal with it?
He found himself chewing at the fingernails on his right hand, a habit he thought he’d conquered when he was a child. He kept the nails long on his right hand and clipped on the other for playing the guitar. If he carried on, he’d have none left on either hand. He could feel anxiety spreading across his chest, a fluttery sensation. He and Ian should not be going to the studio without a warrant. The murderer was still out there. He should tell Oliver what he was up to and have the decision taken away from him. He took a long, slow breath.
He understood something in a brief flash of clarity. The truth about leadership was that sometimes you had to manage the decisions and their consequences, all by yourself. And he’d made a decision that he was going to have to see it through, whether he had second thoughts or not. He couldn’t back down in front of Ian Gould, not if he wanted to hold his head up in front of the older, more experienced officers he was supposed to be leading.
The buzz of his phone interrupted his thoughts. Message from his mum. Had he found out anything about Alison? He didn’t want to tell her. He really didn’t want them rushing off to prison to see her, getting themselves all wound up again, giving her all their savings, letting her steal from them and treat them like dirt, all over again. This way, they had over a year of peace and quiet before she would be paroled. Maybe the prison would get her on one of their programmes and get her addiction under control. Maybe. His finger hovered over the tiny keyboard as he prepared the lie, ‘No news yet, be in touch soon as I know something. D xx’.
He wondered what it would be like to be an only child, and whether it was worse to know that your sister was dead, like poor little Jenna Braithwaite, or to wish that she was, like poor little Dan Hellier. He stared guiltily at the now empty bin next to his desk, paper evidence destroyed. ‘A few days won’t make any difference, I’ll tell them at weekend,’ he said to the bin.
The subdued bustle of people going about their jobs, discussing the latest information, enjoying the Lizzie Singh story and typing up notes, ballooned up behind him. He took a moment to appreciate that he hadn’t had to do anything to make this bunch work as a team, except to be part of the team himself. He hoped that the compromises needed to be a leader were ones that he could make. He banged his empty mug on the table.
‘Right, everyone, gather round.’
Sam Knowles loped in from the video room. ‘Sir, I’ve scoured this disc from early on Sunday morning to midnight on Sunday night. Carly Braithwaite didn’t go into the studio. Abrams at came in at twelve-oh-six pm. A couple of lads with guitars arrived at about one forty pm and left at five forty-three pm. Abrams left a bit later than he originally said he did, at nine thirteen pm.’
‘So, no sign of Carly Braithwaite or Jamie May?’ Sam shook his head. Ian Gould looked disappointed. It would have made life a whole lot easier if they had had a genuine need to search the premises as part of a murder enquiry.
‘How much more stuff is on there?’ asked Sally.
‘I got there to collect the disc at about five thirty pm yesterday, so I suppose it’s got all Monday’s visitors on it, as well as the previous couple of weeks.’ He stopped as they looked at him in disbelief. ‘It’s a sort of stop-motion camera. Only records when there’s movement at the door, then switches itself off. Quite sophisticated kit, I’d say.’
‘Thanks, Sam, and I hate to do this to you, but could you go back a bit further and see who visited earlier in the week?’ asked Dan.
Gould asked for any footage of the foreigners arriving on Monday or Tuesday, and any signs of anything being moved out of the studio.
Sam shrugged, not looking excited by the prospect of more hours in front of a computer screen. His face brightened, ‘I could go over to the Studio and get some more discs, sir, if you want me to?’
Dan smiled but shook his head. He understood why that would be a journey Sam would like to make, but he would have to do his chatting up of Chas Lloyd on his own time. ‘I think there’s more than enough on the disc you’ve got, Sam.
‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, it seems we have to take Jed Abrams off our list of murder suspects for the moment, as we don’t have enough on him to charge him with. If the girl didn’t get as far as the studio, then we have no reason to suspect him.’ He flashed a look at Gould. ‘But we keep him on the board, because all my little grey cells tell me that he is up to no good in that studio, and so he remains a person of interest.’
‘It’s young Jamie looking favourite, though, isn’t it?’ asked Sally. ‘He was with the girl at Westlake’s on Saturday night, and presumably he was there Sunday morning. Maybe he found out that Carly was having an affair with her teacher and flipped. Both Claire Quick and Jenna Braithwaite said he was keen on her.’
‘But why kill Carly, and not the teacher?’ asked Gould.
‘Did Alan Braithwaite say that Carly had stayed out all night?’ asked Dan.
‘No, he didn’t and neither did Jenna. Maybe she sneaked in early in the morning? If the empties I saw in the bin were anything to go by, I doubt Alan Braithwaite hears a great deal in the early morning.’
‘And why,’ added Gould, ‘would Jamie feel the need to assault and tie up the English teacher? It was the Music teacher having the affair with Carly. What was he so frightened of that he had to resort to violence towards a teacher?’
Silence greeted him. None of it made sense.
‘Was Jamie at the teacher’s house because he intended to hurt him? Jamie must have known that Claire Quick would tell the police he’d been there,’ put in Sally.
Dan nodded at her. ‘That’s where I’m heading too. Westlake may still be our man. It makes sense if he told Jamie what he had done, or if Jamie witnessed the murder and was there to extract revenge. But we still need to search Jamie’s room while we’ve got him here in the station, in case we find anything, so let’s do that first. Sally, see if his mother will co-operate, will you?
‘Also, what did the Braithwaites say about Sunday?’
‘Not a lot,’ replied Sally, consulting her notes. ‘Dad said she was excited and took ages to get ready. He went to the pub in the afternoon to watch the footy, admits he didn’t get back until late. Jenna went out because she and Carly had had a row over friends, so she didn’t see her sister leave. Neither of them could be clear about timings for the day.’
The door opened to admit Lizzie Singh, and, much to her embarrassment, she received a round of applause, and a wolf whistle from Gould. She stood in the doorway, having changed into her own clothes, brown eyes huge, looking a bit lost.
Dan stepped forward. ‘PC Singh, great to see you. Good job out there. I’ve spoken to Sergeant White and he’s happy for you to be seconded onto the team for the rest of the week at least. Take a seat over near Sergeant Ellis and she’ll brief you. We think your local knowledge of the area and the young people in it will be invaluable to the investigation.’
Lizzie did as she was told, pulling up a chair next to Sally and keeping her head down until the heat faded from her face. She took out her notebook from her handbag and fumbled around her breast pocket for her pen, then remembered she was in civvies and poked about to get it out of her bag.
Dan pulled their attention back to the wall behind him. ‘It’s still early days, only two days since the murder. I know we have lost one potential suspect, but we have one in custody and soon we’ll have another one, Mr Miles Westlake. We’re just not quite there.’ He sighed.
‘The problem is that we still have no real motive for this murder except the jealousy angle. It doesn’t seem right that young Jamie May would kill the girl he professed to love. More likely that he would kill the teacher.’ Several nods and grunts confirmed his speculation. ‘Which leaves us with Miles Westlake, if we can work out how he did it. And, more importantly, when he did it.’ There was no reply this time - they all had the same information.
Dan searched their faces and risked another speculation, ‘I think we have all the players on the pitch already, ladies and gentlemen. This was no random killing. So, we’ll stop the house to house and school enquiries and focus on the three in the frame.’ He crossed to the board and circled their names. Westlake, May and Braithwaite.
‘Yes, I know what you’re going to say,’ he said when Sally raised a hand, ‘but we don’t write off the father yet. He’s volatile at the moment obviously, but we don’t have a clear understanding of his movements on the Sunday, and his violent outbursts may be hiding guilt as much as grief.’ He frowned, consulting his mental list and chewing his bottom lip.
‘Right. Sally, take Lizzie with you this evening and pick up Miles Westlake, bring him in under arrest for a formal. We have him for possible kidnap and assault, too. We’ll keep him in overnight.’
Sally nodded and smiled at the young officer next to her.
Dan continued, ‘Bill, the Post-mortem report is on my desk but I haven’t got a minute. Go through it with Ben and dig out the relevant details for the wall before you go home tonight, please. Can you see if the forensic team got any decent tyre or footprints from the scene? I’d still like to know what vehicle transported her.’ And, where it is now, he thought. ‘We’ll push back the formal interviews as far as we can tomorrow, to give us time to do a bit more sleuthing.’ He gave the team time for a snigger. ‘What? Don’t we sleuth anymore? I bet DCI Gould sleuths, don’t you?’
‘Certainly do. The old ways are the best, as I keep telling you whippersnappers. If it was good enough for Sherlock, it’s good enough for me.’ He patted his stomach and smiled round the room, enjoying the brief release of tension.
‘Jamie May is definitely going down for kidnap and assault unless Claire Quick withdraws her statement, so we can keep him here for twenty four hours anyway. Then we’ll see if we need to extend or release him on bail once we have Miles Westlake’s statement.
‘Ian, you speak to the boy’s mother and I’ll just pop into the interview room to see if I can get anything out of him before the solicitor arrives.’ He paused and consulted his notepad, all jobs allocated.
‘Right, that’ll do. There’s overtime in this - so don’t skimp on anything. I want thorough work and no mistakes. Let’s do an eight o’clock briefing tomorrow morning.’ He slid off the desk and made his way back to the dishwasher with his mug, signalling the end of the meeting.
As they all got to work, Dan felt in better control. At least there were no snide looks or remarks for him to pretend to ignore, and they did have a couple of suspects to interrogate.
His anxiety about the evening ahead retreated to a small nagging voice.