TANNAHILL RAPS ON A DOOR and opens it to find a startled woman behind a desk with wide, magnified eyes behind her reading glasses.
“Sorry,” Tannahill says, holding up his warrant card. “Is there a terminal in here I could borrow for a few minutes?”
“Oh, here.” She gets up from behind her desk clutching the copy of OK! magazine she was secretly reading when Tannahill and Laughton burst in. “Use mine, I was just heading off for a break anyway.”
She taps her keyboard to log off, then heads for the door. “All yours,” she says brightly, stepping out into the corridor and away toward the entrance in search of nicer coffee.
“Right.” Tannahill collapses into her still-warm seat and taps in his login details. “Let’s see if we can find any connection between either Mike or Kate Miller and the McVey case.”
Laughton pulls another chair over and sits beside him. “We should focus on Kate Miller,” she says. “We already know quite a bit about Mike Miller, and there’s no obvious connection.”
Tannahill logs into the central case file database. “OK, so we know Kate was married to Mike Miller, so she must have known him back when he was Mark Murphy. Maybe we can find out who she was by looking at him.”
He taps “Mark Murphy SunnySet” into the search field and hits enter, and a small page of results appears on-screen.
“I was expecting more,” Laughton says, looking at the short list of files. “I thought it was a big case.”
“It was, but it only became a police matter after he disappeared. Everything before that would have gone through the civil courts and the various local health authorities. I can put in a request for all the LEA files, but there’ll be hundreds of them and, from experience, it will take a while to get hold of them. Local health organizations have even fewer resources than we do.” He opens Mark Murphy’s missing persons file and starts scrolling through the usual collection of documents that build up on every investigation—police reports, witness statements, photographs.
“Do we know who was defending Murphy in all these civil cases against him?” Laughton says. “Our killer is fixated on justice, so that might be a good place to start.”
Tannahill clicks through to the end of the file where the interviews are and runs down the list. “Here we go, phone interview with retained counsel for Mark Murphy and SunnySet Ltd., a Ruth Cottington-Bray QC.”
Laughton catches her breath and sits back in her chair.
Tannahill turns to her. “What?”
“Ruth Cottington-Bray was the barrister who defended Adrian McVey. She’s the one who got his case thrown out.”
“Charming client list she kept. Let’s see what she had to say about Murphy.” Tannahill opens the document and they both skim-read the transcript, the barrister’s impatience and reluctance to say anything radiating off the page like static as she responds to every question:
No, I had no idea Mark Murphy was going to abscond.
No—he has not been in contact with me.
No—we have no outstanding business with him and therefore no longer consider him a client.
No—I have no idea of the current whereabouts of either him or Kathryn Warren.
“Who’s Kathryn Warren?” Tannahill scrolls back up to the summary report at the start of the transcript.
Interview with Ruth Cottington-Bray, QC, of CBC Law (the law firm retained by Mark Murphy) regarding his disappearance and also that of Kathryn Warren—lead member of the legal team representing Mr. Murphy—who disappeared on the same date.
“Cherchez la femme,” Laughton murmurs. “Is there a photo of her?”
Tannahill jumps to the appendix and finds the media tab where all the photos are archived. Warren, K., is not there. He opens Google and does an image search for Kathryn Warren and thousands of results come back—social media profile pics, actor headshots, several realtor sites, even a couple of gravestones.
“Add Adrian McVey to the search,” Laughton suggests.
Tannahill types it in and the results come back again. The images are now mostly of pages taken from high school yearbooks and group graduation photos where both names appear on separate photographs. But there is one photograph on the third row that stands out, and Tannahill looks at Laughton when he sees it.
“Are you OK?” he says, tentatively. “I can finish this on my own if you like, there’s no need for you to—”
“It’s fine,” Laughton cuts him off. “I’m fine. Open the image. Let’s see it bigger.”
Tannahill clicks on the picture and it opens in another window, almost filling the screen.
It shows a crowd of people standing on the steps outside the Old Bailey Central Criminal Courts in Central London. Adrian McVey stands in the center, head down, eyes watchful, thinning hair scraped neatly across his freckled scalp. On his right a bewigged, strident-looking woman appears to be mid-statement, her arm pointing at McVey but her attention directed at the unseen press. On McVey’s other side stands another woman, younger than the other, her long, dark, almost black hair framing her face and matching the dark, well-cut suit that accentuates her athletic frame. Laughton takes her phone, finds a photograph of Kate Miller on one of the news sites, and holds it up for comparison. Apart from the obvious hair color and some subtle changes around the mouth and nose, it’s the same person.
Kate Miller is Kathryn Warren.
“That’s the connection,” Laughton says, sitting back in her chair.
Tannahill deletes McVey from the search field, adds Mark Murphy, and gets pages of results back, mostly showing Kate and Mike Miller back when they were still Kathryn and Mark leaving various legal-looking buildings, heads down, suits on, briefcases in hand. Tannahill clicks on the first image and a page opens—The Daily again—the article outlining the ongoing multimillion-pound compensation case against Mark Murphy and identifying the woman with him as Kathryn Warren, a rising star in the world of high-profile and contentious defense cases with a reputation built on the foundation of successfully defending “Masked Monster” suspect Adrian McVey.
“Charming couple,” Tannahill murmurs. “She keeps pedophiles out of jail and he kills old people for profit. They were made for each other.”
Laughton nods. “What’s your suspect’s name again?”
“Lawson,” Tannahill replies. “Corporal Neil Lawson. Looks like he killed Mike Miller because he was responsible for the death of his war hero grandfather, and he killed Kate Miller because she helped him get away with it, then ran off to live the high life on all the cash he’d made.”
Laughton frowns as she thinks it through. It makes sense, mostly. “Why send them the newspaper cutting in the post?”
Tannahill shrugs. “Maybe he wanted to rattle them, let them know he knew who they were and where they lived. If that was his plan, it worked. You heard that witness—the Millers never argued, but they were arguing when they got that cutting.”
Laughton nods. “Makes sense. It also ties in with the heightened performance nature of the crime scenes: Mike Miller being forced to die in the same way his care home residents did, lying in his own filth and covered in bedsores. And Kate Miller arranged like the symbol of blind justice she was supposed to serve but clearly didn’t.”
Tannahill nods. “You’ve got to admire it on some level. I mean, I know it’s not the kind of justice we’re supposed to applaud or uphold, but I bet you’d be hard pushed to find a single person out there who didn’t think these two deserved what they got. I’m almost tempted to sit on all this and let him get away with it.”
Laughton smiles, then frowns as something new occurs to her. “I don’t think he expects to get away with it.”
Tannahill thinks for a moment, then nods. “The medals.”
“Yes. Why leave behind such a specific clue? He must have known it would eventually lead us to him. You think maybe he’s setting himself up for suicide by cop?”
“I hope not, though he’s obviously in an extreme mental state and I can imagine there’s also a large degree of bitterness there. You serve your country, it turns you into a cold, efficient killing machine, then you come back home and find you don’t belong. Not only that, but that same country lets your war hero granddad die, neglected in a care home, and the authorities can’t even bring the people responsible to justice. I looked up Lawson’s granddad, by the way. He was the only merchant seaman to win a Victoria Cross in the Second World War. The ship he was skippering got hit by a torpedo a few hundred miles south of Greenland. It was carrying eight thousand tons of phosphate, so basically it was little more than a floating bomb. By rights the ship should have been instantly vaporized, but for some reason the torpedo didn’t go off. It just pierced the hull and sat there ticking as the ship got pounded by the Atlantic.
“The captain, Cyril Lawson, evacuated his crew, but night was falling and the weather was awful and getting worse. He realized they were unlikely to survive the night in the lifeboats so figured he had nothing to lose, jumped over the side with nothing but a rope and a crowbar, and basically whacked the torpedo until it either blew up or fell into the sea. Luckily for him it was the latter. After that the crew came back on board, patched the hole the torpedo had made, and made it back to port on schedule. Unbelievable bravery. And then he ended up dying of neglect in one of Mike Miller’s grotty care homes after signing over everything he’d worked his entire life for to pay for his shitty treatment.” Tannahill shakes his head. “I hope we find Neil Lawson alive, I really do. I’d love it if he got to tell his story.”
The door opens and they look up expecting to see the woman with the big glasses and a large Starbucks in her hand wanting her office back.
But it isn’t her.
There’s a moment of awkward silence, when nobody even seems to breathe. Then the man standing in the doorway looks over at Tannahill. “Could you give us a moment, please,” he says.
Tannahill looks at Laughton, then back at Commissioner Rees.
“Yes, sir,” he says.
Then he gets up and leaves, glancing back at Laughton in helpless apology as John Rees closes the door behind him and turns to his daughter.