Die With Me (26 page)

‘You really think there’s a link?’

‘Course there is. Has to be.’ Clarke closed his eyes, wincing. He was sweating heavily and Tartaglia wondered if he should call a nurse. But he knew what Clarke’s response would be. At least Clarke was still alive and his mind was all there. Tartaglia sat back in his chair as far as he could, so that Clarke couldn’t see his face.

‘He’s not picking them at random… out of the phone book… is he?’ Clarke continued, almost in a whisper. ‘Ask yourself again what they all have in common. Forget age. I agree with you. It’s about personality. The sort of girls they were. What put them in his way. They all were depressed, for starters. Weren’t they? At least three of them wanted to top themselves with him. If it wasn’t on the internet…where do people like that meet one another?’

‘We’ve tried the Samaritans but according to the phone records, Kelly Goodhart’s the only one who ever called them.’

‘What about all the public phone boxes round where they lived? They may not have wanted to call from home.’

Tartaglia groaned. With everything else on their plate, the job of checking the records going back over the last couple of years was the last thing they needed. They were still grappling with following up all the calls that had come in from
Crimewatch
. ‘True. But if so, they could have called from anywhere, near their school, near the tube, near a friend’s house, et cetera, et cetera.’

‘C’mon, Mark. I know it’s a long shot, but what else you got? Talk to Carolyn at least. See if she can persuade Cornish to give you more manpower.’

‘She won’t pay any attention to me, I know.’

Clarke exhaled loudly, his breath rasping. ‘Listen, mate, what’s happened to you? This isn’t the old Mark talking. What do you do with a woman? You, of all people, should know that.’

Tartaglia smiled. ‘Try not to lose my temper, with this one at any rate.’

‘That would be nice for starters. But you’ve got to work on her… charm her… haven’t you? They’ve all got their little ways. I know she’s your boss and you’re pissed off because she came in and stole the bloody case from under you. But that was that prick Cornish’s doing. Problem is… you don’t fancy her… so you can’t be arsed to make peace. But you’ve got to swallow your pride ’n’ have a go. You know I’m right.’

‘Easier said than done. She’s as warm and approachable as a rattlesnake.’

Clarke waved a hand slowly in the air dismissively. ‘That tough stuff’s just an act. Believe me. Women are all the same underneath… ’part from the bloody muff divers, of course. Even your charm would be lost on them, I agree. But I’m pretty sure Carolyn doesn’t bat for their side.’

‘Trevor, you’re not listening. She’s really taken against me, for some reason.’

‘She told you that, did she? Nah, didn’t think so. You just need your heads knocking together, you two. She probably thinks… like the rest of us… that you’re a smartarse… arrogant… prick… who believes he’s God’s gift. But you do have another side to you. When you can be fucked. That’s why we all love you.’

‘That’s nice. I’ll try and remember that, when Steele has me out on my ear.’

‘As I said, you’ve got to try and charm the lady. Like that wanker Kennedy’s been doing. He knows which side his bloody bread is buttered. Carolyn’s not a bad sort underneath. You need to try and patch things up. Get her on your side.’

‘You think I should tell her that I saw Kennedy peeping?’

Clarke thought for a moment before shaking his head slowly. ‘Don’t waste your time. But you ought to be keeping tabs on him. See what he’s up to. The pansy deserves a good chinning, if you ask me. If he does it again, shop him to Cornish. Just make sure it’s not you that sees him doing it. Going back to the case. My gut feel is that it’s a botched job so far. There’s no case on earth where there aren’t clues. Believe me. You’re either blind… and it’s staring you in the bloody face… or you’ve been barking up the wrong tree.’

‘Thanks, Trevor. You’ve made my day.’

Tartaglia was about to tell Clarke that it was time for him to go when his mobile rang. As usual, he’d forgotten to follow hospital instructions to switch it off. He saw from the screen that it was Steele. He flipped it open and listened to what she had to say. When he had finished he turned back to Trevor.

‘Yes!’ Tartaglia punched the air.

Clarke craned his head round to look at him. ‘Fucking cat that’s got the cream now, eh? So, what’s up?’

‘We may have a breakthrough at last. We’ve got a fingerprint match from Hammersmith Bridge. It’s a bloke called Sean Asher and he fits the description of the man seen with Kelly Goodhart. They’re taking him in for questioning to his local nick and I’ve got to get over there right away.’

Clarke sighed. ‘Bugger me. Forget everything I’ve just said. Lady Luck loves you, mate, even if Carolyn Steele doesn’t. Maybe… sodding devil that you are… you’re going to be bailed out. I’ll be expecting an instant update, mind.’

Tartaglia drew in his breath with a whistle and shook his head. ‘Sorry, Trevor. Looks like I’m going to be very busy for a while. Don’t know when I’ll find the time to drop by and see you again.’

Clarke narrowed his eyes and gave him a lopsided grin. ‘You sod. Here’s me in my state ’n’ you’re sat there winding me up. Thought you was interested in
me
and not this friggin’ case. Now bugger off. Don’t come back until you’ve made some progress. If not… I’ll get Sally-Anne to wheel me in my bed straight down to Barnes. I’ll sort you idle plonkers out and there’ll be blood on the carpet, I warn you.’

Sitting in meeting room three at Paddington Green Station, half-drunk cups of cold coffee littering the table in front of them, tape and camera still running after nearly two hours, it occurred to Tartaglia that he’d been bowled yet another googly. It was proving to be a long and frustrating night and the pressure of knowing that Steele and Kennedy were watching in another room on the video link, along with Dave Wightman, didn’t help.

Sean Asher had been arrested on suspicion of murder but was proving impervious to any of the usual tactics. He seemed quite resigned to sitting there all night, if need be. Whatever Tartaglia and Nick Minderedes threw at him, he refused to admit to having killed Kelly Goodhart. He spoke quietly and emphatically and refused to raise his voice. He had even politely told his brief to shut up when she had tried to intervene at one point. Considering everything, Asher seemed extraordinarily calm and in control of himself. It was as if none of it mattered. He was innocent and he didn’t need anybody to look out for him. He had all the self-righteousness of a martyr.

The room was hot and airless and beneath his jacket, Tartaglia could feel his shirt sticking to his skin, the collar uncomfortably tight. He wondered how much longer Asher would hold out. Asher sat calmly opposite, upright in his chair, dressed like a student in torn, faded jeans, trainers and a short-sleeved black T-shirt which showed off a muscular pair of arms. Judging by the smell coming from Asher’s corner, he hadn’t washed in days. He was in his early thirties, tall and well-built, with very short spiky brown hair that looked recently cut. Apart from the length of his hair, he fitted the general description of the man seen with Gemma Kramer. However, there was something soft, almost girlish about his round face, which was at odds with his muscular physique, and the nails of his nicotine-stained fingers were bitten to the quick, indicating a nervous, self-destructive disposition. He was not how Tartaglia had pictured Tom.

Asher’s fingerprint had popped up on the system because he had been arrested for a minor affray during an anti-Iraq war demonstration a few years before. There was nothing else on the system and it was hardly a textbook background for a serial killer. It didn’t feel right. Tom didn’t seem the type to waste time with ideals. Tartaglia couldn’t see him waving the flag for anybody other than himself and if he had, he certainly wouldn’t be so stupid as to get arrested for something so trivial.

Before the interview had started, Steele had shown Tartaglia a copy of the most recent email from Tom. She was matter-of-fact about it, but he sensed beneath that cool exterior that it was getting to her and, thinking back again to the lines in the email, he felt full of doubt. He just couldn’t square the tone and vocabulary of what he had read with the weak-faced man sitting in front of him.

The brief, Harriet Wilson, was a tired-looking woman in her mid-forties, with a mess of sandy hair threaded heavily with grey. She sat silently beside Asher, fanning her face with a notebook, eyes focused on a far corner of the room while Asher went through the answers for the umpteenth time. Yes, he had gone to Hammersmith Bridge with Kelly Goodhart. Yes, they had made a suicide pact to jump off the bridge together. But no, he hadn’t tried to kill her. She had tried to take him with her instead. The witness was either lying or blind. The one thing he wouldn’t volunteer was why he had wanted to kill himself in the first place.

‘You really expect me to believe that she tried to pull you over with her? What a load of crap,’ Minderedes said, throwing his eyes up to the ceiling and shaking his head as if he couldn’t stomach such a lie.

Asher shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s the truth. She was in a right state, I can tell you. Didn’t want to do it on her own.’ His voice was surprisingly high pitched for a tall man, nasal, almost reedy, and he had a light northern accent.

‘But according to you, you let her.’

‘Couldn’t help it. As I said, when I got there, I bottled out. Found I couldn’t go through with it.’

‘You say you changed your mind,’ Tartaglia said, cutting in. ‘You still haven’t told us why.’

Asher raised his thin brows. ‘Why? I got cold feet, like. It’s allowed, isn’t it? Hadn’t signed a ruddy contract.’

Late at night, forty feet up on a freezing, windy bridge, with a total stranger, Tartaglia could almost sympathise. But Tom was a clever bastard and it was the only story that made sense, other than genuine innocence.

Minderedes leaned across the table with his hard man face. He too was sweating heavily, his usually fluffy dark hair plastered back on his skull. With his strange yellow-green eyes and beetley black brows, he actually looked quite menacing.

‘Pull the other one, Tom. It’s got bells on it,’ he said.

‘Why do you keep calling me Tom? My name’s Sean.’

‘Silly me. I’m the one who’s confused again,’ Minderedes said. ‘You told her your name was Chris, didn’t you?’

‘Right. I explained that.’

‘You said you didn’t want her to know who you really were, in case she was some sort of nutter.’

‘That’s right.’

‘But you’re the nutter, aren’t you?’

Asher shook his head. ‘Christ, you people are so cynical. It’s sad.’

‘Goes with the job. If you saw what we see every day… but there, I’m forgetting that you do.’

Asher’s expression hardened. ‘If I want to do away with myself, that’s my business. Nobody else’s. And it don’t make me a nutter.’

‘It does, when you try to involve someone else.’

‘I didn’t “try to involve her”, as you say. She was acting under her own free will. That’s not against the law, is it, or is Big Brother already onto that little loophole? Fuck free will. Just do what you’re told. Is that it?’

‘You think it’s a loophole, persuading people to kill themselves in front of you, pushing them off when they don’t want to do it? In our book, it’s murder.’

Asher shook his head slowly as if he found the question incredible. ‘I didn’t push her and I didn’t have to persuade her. It was what she wanted to do. How many more times do I have to say it?’

Minderedes banged the table with his fist and stood up. ‘As many as it will take until you tell us the truth, matey.’

‘I give up. You folk are worse than on the box.’ Asher folded his arms tightly in front of him, clamping his lips shut as if there was nothing more to be said. He was mistaken if he thought they were going to let it go at that.

‘I’ve had enough of your fucking stories,’ Minderedes said, and turned his back on Asher, striding over to the tiny barred window in the corner and appearing to look out. It was a good dramatic gesture until you knew that there was only the car park outside.

Tartaglia had so far taken a back seat for most of the proceedings and let Minderedes have his head. He was an excellent detective and generally good at interviews, usually because he knew how to get up the interviewee’s nose to the point where they let something slip out of sheer annoyance. But Asher seemed impervious. It was time for a more subtle approach.

‘OK, Sean. Let’s say we believe you for a moment. We’ve read the emails between you and Kelly Goodhart. Why was she so wary of you? What was she scared of?’

‘I told you, she thought I was someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘Search me.’

‘You obviously said something to reassure her when you spoke on the phone, otherwise she would have never agreed to meet you.’

‘Don’t remember.’

‘That’s not good enough, you know. Unless you can convince us otherwise, we’re looking at a charge of murder here.’

The brief sprang to life. ‘Hang on a minute. We’re going round in circles here. You don’t even have a body.’

‘Come on, Mrs Wilson,’ Tartaglia said. ‘Don’t get technical. You don’t think Kelly Goodhart would have survived, do you?’ Wilson stared blankly at him. ‘It’s only a matter of time before her body turns up.’

She sighed. ‘OK, Inspector. Say it does. Even in your wildest dreams, you can’t turn this into a charge of murder.’

‘Can’t we? The witness saw him struggle with Mrs Goodhart. She said she thought he pushed her over.’

‘Inspector, I don’t want to teach my grandmother to suck eggs but you know there’s all the difference in the world between someone thinking something might have happened and it actually happening. All you have is suspicion.’

‘Yes, reasonable suspicion in the circumstances.’

Wilson shook her head. ‘As I see it, we have a set of circumstances here which can be interpreted at least two ways.’

Tartaglia stifled a sigh, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. Wilson was right, of course. Somehow, just by articulating it, she had managed to deflate even the smallest bubble of hope. They had nothing at that juncture that would even get past the CPS, unless of course Asher confessed, and it looked very unlikely that he was going to oblige.

‘My client is trying to be helpful, Inspector,’ Wilson continued. ‘But if you insist on pushing this murder lark without any proper evidence, I’m going to have to advise him to stop talking to you.’

Tartaglia continued to look at Sean, who was staring down at the table in front of him, expression fixed as if he was no longer engaged in the conversation.

‘Help me, Sean, and I’ll help you.’ He waited for a moment, studying Asher’s blank moon of a face, wondering what was going on in his mind. ‘See here, Sean, we’re looking for somebody who was in contact with Kelly Goodhart and wanted to watch her die. Sick though that is, he wouldn’t just leave it there. If she got cold feet, like you say happened to you, he’d damn well make sure she did it, whether she wanted to or not.’ There was still no reaction from Asher. ‘How would you feel if somebody had forced you to go through with it? Not because they wanted company in the last moments of their life, like Mrs Goodhart, but because they’re warped and twisted and get turned on by it. This bloke is sick. He gets his kicks from watching innocent people die.’ Asher looked up, an almost imperceptible softening about the corners of his eyes. ‘If you’re not this man, as you say you’re not, we need to find him.’ Still watching Asher, Tartaglia let the sentence hang before continuing. ‘We know he’s done it before. Not with mature women like Mrs Goodhart, who were sure about what they were doing, but with young, defenceless, depressed little girls.’

‘Don’t start trying to shift the ground, Inspector,’ Mrs Wilson said. ‘We’re here to talk about only one thing and that’s what happened on Hammersmith Bridge.’

‘This is the bloke in the papers, right?’ Asher said, ignoring her, looking puzzled.

‘We think so,’ Tartaglia said. ‘Please try and remember what Kelly Goodhart told you. It’s very important.’

Asher scratched his bottom lip. For a moment it looked as if he was about to come out with something meaningful. Then he shook his head. ‘I don’t remember, I’m sorry.’

Tartaglia sighed. He didn’t believe him for a second. ‘OK. Let’s take a break here. Interview suspended at ten fifty p.m.’

He wanted to give Asher time to reflect. He had seen the hesitation in his eyes, the slight unbending as though he had finally caught his interest. Hopefully, what he had said had struck a chord. On a more practical note, he also needed a pee, some fresh air and some more coffee to keep him going. And if he was lucky, he’d also be able to nip out back for a quick fag before Steele caught him.

‘So, we’ve got nothing so far,’ Steele said, in an almost accusatory voice looking from Tartaglia to Minderedes and back again.

‘Certainly nothing to hold him on,’ Minderedes said, shrugging. ‘Unless we turn up something juicy when we search his flat, that is.’

They were in another meeting room along the corridor from where Asher was being held. Steele, Tartaglia, Wightman and Minderedes were grouped around the small table, coffee and a half-eaten plate of stale sandwiches from the canteen in front of them. Kennedy stood behind, as if he wanted to separate himself from proceedings, leaning against the wall, hands in pockets, his expression unreadable.

The room was just as airless and stiflingly hot, thick with the sour smell of stale sweat and tired bodies, the occasional whiff of aftershave coming from Minderedes whenever he leaned across for his coffee or a sandwich. It was enough to give anyone a headache. Still dying for a smoke, Tartaglia wondered how much longer Steele would keep them there, pointlessly going round and round in circles. He wanted to get back to Asher. He knew he had something interesting to say.

The only surprising thing was how silent Kennedy was. Never one normally to hold back with his opinions, it almost seemed as if he wasn’t there. Either he was deliberately trying not to intrude, which was uncharacteristic, or he was stumped and didn’t want to admit it.

Steele turned to Tartaglia. ‘Mark?’

Tartaglia was fast coming to the conclusion that Asher wasn’t Tom but there was no point in telling them that. Gut feel counted for nothing in that room and he could already hear what Steele would say: ‘Give me facts, not feelings.’ Everything was black and white to her.

‘I agree with Nick,’ Tartaglia said, trying to focus on concrete matters, things that could be explained in a few simple words. ‘We’ve all seen the emails. Kelly Goodhart wanted to kill herself. Asher just happened to be there for the ride, according to him, and we can’t prove otherwise. The witness was quite far away when she saw the struggle. She thought she saw him push Mrs Goodhart over the bridge. But she isn’t a hundred per cent sure. It won’t stand up to cross-examination, if it ever gets that far, which is unlikely. No, whether Asher really is Tom or not, if he sticks to his story he’ll be home and dry.’

‘Dave? Have you got anything to add?’

Wightman shook his head. It had all been said already.

‘What about you, Patrick,’ Steele asked, looking over her shoulder at Kennedy. ‘What do you think?’

Kennedy frowned and pursed his lips, running his fingers through his thick hair for a moment, as if giving the matter deep consideration. ‘Well, it’s tricky,’ he said slowly. ‘Given what I’ve just seen, Asher’s not the type to respond to pressure. I watched him closely. If anything, strong-arm tactics seemed to reinforce his statement of innocence. Now, you could read that two ways: either he’s a tough nut, who’s worked out that if he sticks to the story, you have nothing on him; or he’s probably telling the truth.’ It was stating the obvious but somehow Kennedy made it sound as if he had invented it.