Bright Spark (37 page)

       Sharing
this room with Slowey, another detective from the same unit operated the
recording gear linked to the camera and microphones in the adjoining interview
room. Slowey had been explained away by the interviewer as an officer new to
the unit and learning the ropes.

The
teenage girl, Kelly Somerby, had clearly made an unaccustomed effort to look
her age for the detectives, no doubt goaded by her careworn mother. Her face
seemed blanched, as if she habitually caked it in make-up; the navy blue skirt
of her school uniform bore the bright sheen of newness and she compulsively
fiddled with its hem where it touched her knees; she flicked her pony-tails
away when they fell forward over her shoulders as if she were unused to finding
them there.  

       Ushered
into the interview room, pouting with her arms folded over her breasts, Slowey
watched her on the larger of the outer room’s two screens as she lowered
herself onto the easy chair opposite the interviewer, hunched forward as if
ready to flee. Her mother took a seat nearby, just out of view.

       For
fifteen minutes, Slowey watched the girl’s identity flicker into and out of
focus, one minute a sulking child, the next minute a self-assured young woman,
as the interviewer plodded through the preliminaries.  Kelly understood the
purpose of the interview and was here of her own free will. Kelly understood
the need to speak clearly, forsaking the surly grunt that she might have hoped
to rely on. Kelly passed the ‘truth and lies’ exercise with aplomb, accepting
the falsehood of the statement that she had been driven to the interview in a
pink Cadillac by Snoop Dogg, and the truth of the statements that her mother
was a woman and the interviewer had blonde hair.

       Invited
to tell the interviewer about her relationship with Kevin Braxton, she’d
stumbled, either unwilling to cooperate or uncomfortable with speaking at
length.

       “Tell
her, Kelly!” Her mother had hissed.

       “Please,
Anne, it’s alright,” said the interviewer, soothing. “We’re just here to help
you, Kelly. Nobody wants to pressure you or make you say anything. It’s your
chance to tell us how it really was.”

       “But
you’re all treating me like I’m a victim, yeah. Like I’ve got a disease or
something,” blurted Kelly, brushing aside the ponytail she’d been plucking at.
“Listen, yeah, I’m only here ‘cause of her but I ain’t gonna lie, yeah, ‘cause
that ain’t me. Like, I’ll tell you what you wanna know, yeah, ‘cause then
you’ll see the real me an’ see I’m a woman yeah with my own body and there
ain’t nothin’ to worry about ‘cause I’m the only one can worry about me, yeah.”

       “I
don’t know who you are any more, Kelly, I really don’t.”

       “Anne,
we discussed this. Now, please, just try to relax. Kelly, that’s great, I
absolutely understand. Just take a deep breath and tell me all about your
relationship with Kevin.”

       Over
the next hour, Kelly recounted her relationship with Kevin Braxton in
excruciating and sometimes gleeful detail, the look on her mother’s face off
camera evidently as gratifying to her as any frisson she ever got from
Braxton.  It had started at the school gates before her fifteenth birthday with
sweet words – “he’s funny, dead clever, romantic, yeah” – and swagger – “he
takes care of me, yeah, he don’t take no shit off no-one.”

Slowey
assumed there was substance abuse but she was coyer about that than she was
about their fumbling and coupling. The points needed to prove the likely
criminal offences doubtless itemised in her notebook, the interviewer built up
a detailed chronology of sexual acts between Kelly and Braxton, including
dates, places and the nature of the penetration.

Slowey
noted the details himself, appalled and fascinated. There were few acts they
hadn’t tried, in various locations, all of them consensual but still illegal
and likely to be prosecuted given their relative ages. It was hard to decide
whether it was the physical degradations themselves or the candid glee of their
telling that dragged a series of ragged groans from the girl’s mother.

“I
thought it was just the once, Kelly,” she cried. “For God’s sake, why? You’re
so pretty, so bright. You were anyway.”

“Anne…”
began the interviewer without enthusiasm.

“I’m
like 14, yeah. And I take precautions, yeah. He’s so like tender and
passionate. I ain’t shagging around either. I love him. I’m not a slapper.”

“Tell
me, Kelly,” asked the interviewer, “what prompted you to come forward now and
talk to us?”

“It’s
like my mum, yeah, found out I’d been bunking off school, yeah, so she like
follows me to Kevin’s dad’s allotment and goes mental, calling him a pervert
an’ a rapist an’ screaming an’ bawlin’ an’ that. And, like, now I have to do
all this, yeah, an’ I ain’t been allowed out an’ Kevin ain’t texted or
nothin’.”

       Slowey
took careful notes as Kelly described how the allotment plot could be found,
underlined some key phrases with a scrawl of finality, slammed his notebook
shut and wondered outside to find some clean air to breathe. He wondered how
the law would react if he walled his daughters inside the family home until
their thirtieth birthdays.

       “Never
underestimate the power of pure, dumb luck. This schmuck Braxton has given us
an awful lot of rope to dangle him from.”

Slowey
sank his teeth into the burger, bending forward in the plastic garden chair to
allow the steady trickle of grease from the lump of offal, lard and white bread
between his hands to miss his trousers and puddle on the concrete.

“Not
hungry?”

       “Not
any more,” said Harkness, hiding behind his sunglasses and sipping sugary
coffee from a styrofoam cup. They’d met at a greasy spoon café on an industrial
estate a few minutes’ drive from the town-centre to exchange their news.
Harkness had recounted his interview with Firth’s cell-mate, while Slowey could
boast a sudden and unforeseen glut of well evidenced, chargeable offences he
could hang around Kevin Braxton’s neck.

       “Why
are we meeting here by the way?” asked Slowey, belching in readiness for the
next fist-sized mouthful of heart-stopping goodness.

       “Home
is no longer where the heart is….”

“Or
where your balls are.”

“Go
on. Say it.”

       “I
told you so. Damn, that wasn’t as enjoyable as I expected. Found out and threw
you out, did she?”

       “I got
sloppy. Must have wanted her to find out. I’ve become the weasel you read about
in all those women’s magazines.”

“Hardly.
Weasels are sleek.”

“Anyway,
I’ve got a few weeks. Then she wants me to get out or buy her out of the
place.”

       “Big
mortgage?”

       “Eye-watering.”

       “Ouch.
Want to talk about it?”

       “Christ,
no. Anything but. Come on, let’s do some work.”

       “Good
man,” said Slowey, wiping his fingers and dabbing his mouth with yet another of
Mrs Slowey’s pristine handkerchiefs. He then slid a stapled print-out from his
notebook and slid it across the table. “Feast your eyes. Take your time. It
doesn’t have Dale Murphy’s name on it but it’s him.”

       Harkness
studied the print-out which largely comprised one member’s social ‘wall’
captured from the ‘Facebook’ website. The owner of this section of the wall
went by the name ‘DungeonMaster1336’ and every comment or reply they’d left
featured their signature image, a thumbnail photograph of a blonde child with
vaguely familiar features sucking its thumb. Assuming it was Murphy’s work, was
the image intended as an ironic display of innocence or idiocy? An appended
profile page told him the owner had first registered three years earlier. A
date of birth of 1
^st
January 1901 clearly expressed a desire for
anonymity.

The
fields for home address, qualifications and employment had all been left blank,
but he’d given the correct home town and first half of his postcode.  He’d also
taken the time to list his favourite films and books, a clashing mixture of the
blood-thirsty and the mawkish. ‘Reservoir Dogs’ jostled with ‘Bridges of
Madison County’, ‘Bravo Two Zero’ with ‘The Lovely Bones’.

Murphy
must have either spent a lot of time on the site, or else visited frequently.
As a farmer and trader of virtual livestock and crops, he had excelled. As an
exponent of penguin-flipping for electronic fish, he was rarely bested. His
exchanges with various other users, most of whom used aliases like his own,
seemed largely banal, even when politically inspired. Complaints about traffic,
the price of cigarettes and the need for goal-line technology were occasionally
punctuated by Murphy’s endorsement of online petitions to make pilfering
politicians rot in jail, to have life sentences mean life, or to have drug
dealers flogged in the neighbourhoods they’d despoiled.

Here
and there, Murphy had found kindred spirits, safely anonymous souls always
ready to flatter, to sympathise, to log on and type in approving words with
dozens of exclamation marks or an appreciative ‘LOL’. Until six month ago, he’d
been content with inane banter and the odd grumble about long hours, low pay
and domestic bickering. Since then, his life as seen through the lens of
Facebook had been in freefall and the responses of his contacts less effusive.

Confiding
his suspicion that his wife was sleeping around behind his back, a suspicion
proved by gut feeling and the way she looked at other men, had elicited
responses ranging from ‘just talk to her’ to ‘their al the saim wot you gonna
do lol!!!!!!’. Concerned that even the kids now seemed distant towards him, he
was told, ‘just talk to them, ‘it’s a phase’, or ‘yea they r all ungreatful jus
let em no who brings hom th bacon lol!!!!!!’

Revelations
about an impending disciplinary at work and a related law suit attracted a
barrage of advertising from personal injury lawyers far and wide, an entreaty
to ‘get sum gud advice’, an agreement that ‘there al blud sookers lol!!!!’ and
a variety of winking or glum ‘emoticons’.

From
then on, he’d been flying solo, his almost daily crises growing more and more
shrill, less a cause for companionable small-talk and more a beacon of despair
to ward others away.  He’d been ‘naughty’ and ‘work didn’t know the half of it’.
He’d broken his ‘own sacred code’ in the name of ‘private enterprise’, hooking
up with ‘some very bad men’ just to make a bit of extra money for his family.
He was probably going to get sacked for ‘the stuff they know about’. If they
worked it all out, he’d be ‘at work for years, on the wrong side of them doors,
with no weekends off.’

‘Cornered
like a badger,’ he’d written two days before his death. ‘Call themselves
friends and family but they are all just like lawyers, only wanting to rip my
throat out and eat me alive. Don’t see a way out. Dug down too far already.
Can’t see me getting through the week. Might still be an answer though.
Desperate measures for the desperate man. If you’re reading this two weeks from
now, I bet you’ve heard of me.’

Harkness
found his eyes drawn once more to the sandy-haired child sucking his thumb
alongside every comment, the image now a caricature of Murphy’s fractured mind.
He smoothed down the document’s pages and placed it gently on the table as if
its lethal anger could be so easily assuaged.

“That’s
Murphy alright. Good job. Does management know about this?”

“’Fraid
so. But I wouldn’t let it trouble you.”

“Because
it reinforces the simple suicide version of Murphy’s death?”

“Exactly
so. Still think it was suicide?”

“Maybe.
Maybe not.” Harkness drained his coffee, dregs and all. “Either way, it wasn’t
simple.”

“So,
where to next?”

“Just
let me get this straight,” said Harkness, snatching off his sunglasses and
flicking out a finger for every point he made. “We’ve still got nothing but
circumstantial evidence that Firth started the fire at Marne Close. Murphy
seems to have caused his own death and there’s nothing to contradict that.

“The
next door neighbours saw something important but are lying about it for reasons
unknown. There was a fracas in the pub involving Murphy and Firth, before the
fire and before Murphy’s fall, and we know both Braxtons were present or maybe
even involved. We know Braxton junior knew and hated Firth enough to attack him
in the presence of two uniforms the day after the fire. He later told Tommo it
was a ‘business’ matter. What else?”

“Plenty,”
began Slowey, looking up from his notebook. “We know from the custody record
that Braxton junior had been to hospital that day complaining of various soft
tissue injuries consistent with a bloody good hiding. I may have played my part
in that given that his DNA links him to the burglary at the Friars’ Vaults and
the lumps knocked into my head. One other person was involved in that break and
we know it wasn’t Murphy and probably wasn’t Firth. Over to you. This is fun.
Just like the telly.”

“This
‘Facebook’ intel and the accounts of Firth’s cell-mate and your tame prison
officer suggest that Murphy was thoroughly dirty and ran a cottage industry
supplying drugs inside prison. He also seems to have enjoyed enforcing his own
kind of discipline, sometimes but not always to protect his business.”