‘Let me get this right,’ said DCI Gorman. ‘You’re saying Gillian Mitchell was murdered by her brother.’
‘Of course I’m not saying that,’ said Hazel tartly. ‘I don’t even know if she had a brother. Even if she had, I’ve no idea if he’s the sort of man to end an argument with a wheel-brace. I’m just saying, it’s a possibility we should look into. Most murder victims know their killers. Many are related to their killers. This wouldn’t be the first time that a family squabble ended up in the Coroner’s Court.’
‘Is that what she was writing about? A family squabble? She was hoping to sell an article about how she fell out with her brother?’ He sounded deeply unconvinced.
Hazel had printed out the contents of the folder Gillian Mitchell had labelled ‘Brother Jam’. At some point Gorman would need to read all the material it contained; for the immediate purposes, however, it would be quicker if she summarised it.
‘I don’t think she was writing this for public consumption. I think it was how she ordered her thoughts about something that bothered her. Thinking on the page – it’s a writer thing. Police officers bounce ideas off one another to see if they have legs: writers fix their thoughts by putting them down on paper. Or, these days, on a screen.
‘And then, she seems to have used the file as a journal. She jotted things down as they happened, important things and trivial things alike. As far as Jam goes, I think she was keeping a record that she could refer back to later, to give her a bit of perspective on things. She was concerned about his behaviour, and leaving herself notes about it was a way of judging if she was making a mountain out of a molehill or if he really was becoming increasingly odd.’
‘Odd in what way?’
‘She started the folder six months ago, after he threw a newspaper at her. He disagreed with what she’d written about the political situation in Greece.’
Gorman stared. ‘He knew about the political situation in Greece? He cared about the political situation in Greece?’
‘Apparently. I think that was what worried her – more than the argument, more than having a newspaper thrown at her. She was a journalist, she’d probably had worse things thrown at her.’
‘Haven’t we all?’ muttered Gorman darkly.
‘But he was her brother, they were both middle-aged, and it was an abnormal reaction to reading something he disagreed with. I don’t think it was the first odd thing he’d done: I think it was the one that prompted her to start taking notes. She wanted to remind herself exactly what had happened, so she didn’t either blow it out of proportion or convince herself it was nothing to worry about. She was concerned: not so much for her safety as for his well-being. His mental well-being.’
‘What happened next?’
‘More arguments. Also, he told her he’d argued with people at work – that they didn’t respect him. When she asked him to explain, either he couldn’t or wouldn’t. He wanted her to write an article about workplace harassment, and sulked when she told him to fight his own battles.
‘He had a girlfriend. Gillian never met her, but her brother seemed to value the relationship. When the woman ended it, Jam – I’m sorry, I don’t know what else to call him – blamed that on his colleagues too. He believed they’d poisoned her against him, convinced her she could do better elsewhere.’
‘Did Gillian think that was what happened?’
Hazel shook her head. ‘She thought he was avoiding the truth – that it was his own increasingly random behaviour that wrecked the relationship.’
‘Did she tell him that?’
‘If she did, there’s no record of it here. But she did confront him after the place where he worked burned down.’
Gorman’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline again. ‘He torched the place?’
‘Gillian didn’t know that. She considered it a possibility. She asked him about it, and he denied it. She had no evidence that he’d done anything wrong, only his growing tendency to over-react to perceived slights and setbacks. She didn’t think it was enough to accuse anyone of arson, let alone her own brother.’
‘Bad decision,’ growled Gorman. ‘If she had …’
‘She’d be alive today? Well, maybe. Maybe we’d have found enough evidence for the CPS to bring charges. The other possibility is that we’d have thought she was a histrionic woman who’d fallen out with her brother and was now blaming him for every unsolved crime since the Whitechapel murders.’
‘We wouldn’t have done that,’ he said, outraged, ‘would we? If she’d come to us, we’d have taken her concerns seriously. There’s a distinct progression there, from episodes of rage to possible arson to a potential murder. Ah …’
‘Well, quite,’ nodded Hazel. ‘There was no way she could anticipate that when she was writing these notes. All she had was a lot of unease and a bit of speculation and not very much concrete at all.’
DCI Gorman leaned back in his chair. The realities of policing had been his constant companions since he was twenty years old. He knew that chances to apprehend criminals were missed all the time because there wasn’t the manpower to investigate every report of suspicious behaviour; that hindsight was a wonderful thing; that his job would be very much easier if time ran backwards, so that the fact of a crime in December could be used as grounds for arresting someone when he was contemplating it in October.
He sighed. ‘Jam is a pretty funny name for anyone’s brother. A couple who called their daughter Gillian seem unlikely to have got that imaginative with their son.’
Hazel agreed. ‘So it’s a nickname. Maybe he was christened James, and Jam was a baby name that stuck. Or maybe it’s his initials – J. A. Mitchell. That would work. If we get her birth certificate, we can find out what other children lived in the same house at the next census. That should tell us who Jam is.’
‘Not bad,’ conceded Gorman. ‘Now, if I only knew someone who was really good at electronic data-retrieval …’
Gillian Mitchell had no brothers. She had one sister, Muriel, who had died in infancy. Her parents, Martin and Betty, had continued to live in their rented house in Coventry Road for another fifteen years; both were now deceased. Gillian bought the house in Park Crescent in 2012, at the peak of her earning ability. She had always lived there alone. So far as Colonel Aykhurst or any of the neighbours were aware, she had no surviving family and did not know any monks, evangelists or trades unionists.
While Hazel was working the data, Gorman turned his attention to the workplace fire, the only event referenced in the Brother Jam file that was capable of verification. When he found that, he’d know where Jam had been working and managers or other staff would be able to give him a proper name. Most people have a fairly keen sense of oddness in those around them. Some have so keen a sense of it that they think almost everyone they know qualifies, but if three or four people who used to work at the torched business came up with the same name, even if they weren’t able to explain their reasoning, Gorman would have a prime suspect.
He put Tom Presley onto it. ‘There can’t have been that many suspicious fires in factories or businesses in Norbold in the last six months. Talk to the Fire & Rescue people. They usually know if a fire’s been started deliberately, even if we can’t nail anyone for it.’
But DS Presley’s trip to the fire station on the ring road was discouraging. ‘They couldn’t come up with a single suspicious fire in the last six months that involved a business big enough to employ both the arsonist and the workmates who didn’t like him. There was a fire in a hay barn out past Sedgewick in the spring, but it turned out to be the farmer’s teenage sons and their friends smoking roll-ups behind the bales. The only other possibility was when Fashionistas in Arkwright Street burned down midway through the summer sales. There was a strong suspicion that Alberto Beattie had torched his own shop for the insurance, but we couldn’t prove it.’
The sergeant looked up from his notes. ‘He did, though. I was at school with Bert Beattie, he always was a lying git. Anyway, all his employees were female – two women, three girls. Nobody’s Brother Jam.’
Gorman scowled. ‘I suppose the fact that Gillian Mitchell lived in Norbold is no guarantee that the guy she’s talking about worked here too. He could have worked in Birmingham – Coventry – Wolverhampton … Any damn place, actually. They obviously got together sometimes, but we’re in the middle of the bloody country: you’re never more than a train ride away from anyone. That’s why they call us the Midlands.’
Tom Presley blew his cheeks out. ‘You want me to look for suspicious fires in business premises elsewhere in the Division? Within a hundred miles of Norbold? Further afield?’
But Gorman shook his head. ‘There’ll be too many, we’d never work our way through them. I was assuming that, whoever this Jam guy is, he was living locally. But of course, he doesn’t have to be. Hell, he could have flown in from the other side of the world in order to throw things at Gillian Mitchell and then beat her head in! We’re going to have to find him first. Then check where he was working six months ago and see if there were any unexplained fires there.’
He considered a little longer. Then he said: ‘What about Hazel?’
Presley rolled his eyes. ‘God, I know!’
The DCI radiated disapproval. ‘I mean, how much danger do we think she’s in?’
‘From me, quite a bit,’ grumbled Presley. ‘From the stalker, rather less – unless she eats all the chocolate, drinks all the wine and has a heart attack. From Gillian Mitchell’s Brother Jam? None at all, I wouldn’t think.’
‘You don’t think it’s the same man?’
‘I don’t see any reason to think it is. Someone hit Rambles with a blunt instrument. Well, we’ve all wanted to do that, one time or another. Was it the same blunt instrument that was used to kill Mitchell and Trucker Watts? – there’s no evidence that it was, and the fact that they’re dead and he isn’t suggests that it wasn’t. What do you think? Your instincts are further up the pay-scale than mine.’
They had worked together for a number of years, and Presley had earned a certain amount of leeway. Gorman had no wish to surround himself with yes-men – when he asked for opinions, he didn’t want to hear only his own, tactfully rephrased, coming back to him – but to people who didn’t know him, Tom Presley came over as a bit of a dinosaur: a throw-back to policing the way it used to be done, before the Police & Criminal Evidence Act. And actually, to people who did know him, too.
Gorman said, ‘Coincidences make me uneasy.’
Presley sniffed. ‘Does it even amount to a coincidence? Stick your head in at the Royal’s A&E on a Saturday night and ask how many people they’ve treated for being hit round the head with a blunt instrument. Dozens? Scores? It’s what people do when they’re drunk or angry or feel threatened: they grab something hard and heavy, and swing it.
‘We don’t know why Mitchell and Watts were killed, but we do know it was a deliberate act in both cases. We don’t have a murder weapon, so the perp took it away with him. If he also took it to the scene – which seems likely: there are no brass candlesticks missing from Park Crescent, and I don’t imagine there ever were any behind the skips at the shopping centre – then both attacks were premeditated. He didn’t get carried away: he meant to kill, in both cases.’
‘The attack on Gabriel Ash may have been premeditated.’
‘Maybe,’ conceded Presley. ‘But the intent was different. The guy who ambushed him could have killed him if he’d wanted – he had him on the ground, too stunned to fight back, with the first blow. But he didn’t keep hitting him over the head with his blunt instrument. He kicked the shit out of him instead. He wanted to hurt him, and he wanted to warn him off. Apparently, out of some kind of bizarre obsession with Hazel Best. What can that possibly have to do with Watts and Mitchell?’
Gorman was nodding slowly. He couldn’t argue with any of the points his sergeant had made. That didn’t mean he agreed with his conclusion. ‘Still, I’d be happier if she’d stayed in Cambridgeshire.’
‘Me too,’ said Tom Presley fervently.