One Last Lesson (23 page)

Sitting b
eside Ferris was the duty solicitor, a slightly flustered and badly dressed young man by the name of Ashley Conner. Like many of his ilk, he would spend a couple of years cutting his teeth in custody suites and interview rooms like this and when his conscience ceased repeating the ‘justice for all’ mantra, gained as an impressionable student at college, he would move up-market to a smart law practice and start defending richer clients that could afford to pay for the expensive lifestyle he now craved.

After preliminaries and a gripe from Ferris about being kept in
custody, as he was an innocent man, Walters began to question him about Sarah Robson.

‘Earlier this month
, Detective Sergeant Wallop and myself visited your cottage in Mannings Heath and we asked you whether you knew Sarah Robson. Do you remember what you said?’

‘Remind me
, love, I’ve got a bad memory.’

‘You said, and I quote from my notebook: ‘Never heard of her.’

‘There you go then.’

She reached into a folder. ‘Let me show you this.’ One by one she laid out a series photographs. ‘For the tape, I am now showing Mr Ferris pictures taken by CCTV cameras outside the Havana Bay nightclub in Brighton.’

He leaned over nonchalantly but gripped the side of the table in anger when he saw what was on them. ‘Fucking hell, that’s me!’ he shouted. ‘Where the hell did you get these?’

She pointed at one of the pictures. ‘
Do you agree that these pictures are of you?’

‘Of course
it’s fucking me, who else would it be, David Beckham?’

‘The person you are talking to in that picture is Sarah Robson.’

A light went on in his head as suddenly he realised the shit he was in if this went against him.

‘I see what you’re trying to do. Y
ou’re trying to fit me up. I talk to loads of birds in the queue at the club but it don’t mean I know them.’

‘True
, but you seemed to know Sarah well, you singled her out.’

‘I object to that comment, Detective Sergeant,’ his brief said. ‘That is your interpretation of what took place.’

‘I apologise Mr Conner. I’ll rephrase. From the CCTV pictures, the facts are that as Sarah came closer to the club entrance,’ she said pointing at one picture, ‘you walked away from your station and spoke directly to her, which you can see on this picture.’

Ferris turned and whispered something
to his brief.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Yeah, I knew her name, but only her first name. I’ve spoken to her a few times outside and inside the club and sure I fancied her, who wouldn’t, but no, I’ve never gone out with her or kissed her or anything of that.’

There in that comment, was the n
ub of the case against him. Did they believe he knew Sarah well or not? If he knew her intimately, it was possible that a lover’s tiff had ended tragically and Ferris would have a hard job wriggling out of that one. It was now up to Walters to probe and poke and find out if there were any inconsistencies in his story and to her credit, she spent the next fifteen minutes doing exactly that.

‘
So,’ she said in summary, ‘we seem to have moved from the point where you told us that you didn’t know Sarah very well, to now admitting that you did know her and in fact, you were really quite good mates.’

‘I object to your i
mplication, Sergeant Walters my client did not say that, he barely knows her.’

‘Barely, knows her?’ she said rounding on him. ‘W
here were you these last few minutes? Mr Ferris told us, and we have it on tape, that Sarah Robson approached him one night when she had lost her handbag and after a search, he found it. She was very grateful, he said and later that night, they sat down for a drink together. He also said that every time she came into the club she made a point of seeking him out to say hello. I don’t call that hardly knowing her, do you?’

‘Even still, it does not establish a strong relationship between my client and Miss Robson,’ Conner said, his face a mess of emotions as he tried not to lose it.

‘Mr Ferris, why didn’t you tell us all this before?’

‘Oh, I dunno. I was gutted when I real
ised it was her that was killed. I liked her, I did but I didn’t want to get involved, you know?’

‘Do you know
any of her flatmates?’

‘Yeah, I know them. Jo and Nicole come clubbing as often as Sarah does.’

‘What about Francine?’

‘Yeah, I’ve met her.’

Walters leaned forward. ‘How do you know her then Mr Ferris, Francine doesn’t like to go clubbing?’

Henderson’s concentration was
broken when his phone rang and when returning to the interview observation room ten minutes later, the mood had changed. Ferris looked defeated and he knew by that look on Walters’s face that she believed she’d now got her man.

Conner called for a comfort break
and a few minutes later, Walters made her way into the observation room.

‘Well done Carol, you really blew a hole through
a wall of lies and ambiguity.’

‘
Thank you, sir. What do think?’

‘A few things
still bother me. It was Ferris who discovered the body and we’re still not sure where he was when Louisa was murdered. But don’t forget, even though he lied about knowing Sarah and they might even have been regular sex partners, it still doesn’t mean he killed her. We need to move it to the next level; why would he kill her, what’s his motivation?’

‘For the first one, I’m sure we can get a criminal psychologist to testify that its normal behaviour for people like him to report the killings they’ve done and in any case, if the body was found by someone else, we would have
knocked on the door of his cottage eventually, living so close to the golf course and all. Maybe he was just trying in a dopey sort of way to put a little spanner in the works to try and deflect us.’

‘He’s certainly done that but look
, if he did it, why did he pick her up in Brighton and then dump her body two hundred yards away from his house? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Maybe he was taking her back to h
is place for a night of sex and something went wrong.’

‘That’s plausible but we’ve searched his house and found nothing
there belonging to Sarah.’

‘Maybe they wer
e doing it in his car.’

‘We haven’t
searched his car, have we?’

‘No, he’s been away in Yorkshire all this time.’

‘Damn.’

‘On your second point
, about where he was when Louisa was killed, we’ve asked him for receipts but he said he chucks them away. Like a lot of builders I know, he doesn’t use a credit card only cash.’

‘That’s an important point. If he can’t produce them we’
ll need to analyse the cameras on the M1 or A1 and see if we can spot his car and interview people in Scarborough and check the town cameras to make sure he was there.’ He sighed. Why couldn’t these things ever be simple and straightforward?

‘Ok but does that mean…’

‘Hold on. It would be easy to say ‘yes’, go ahead and charge him and after that last phone call, even Harris believes it was him, but I’m going to need more than circumstantial evidence and gut-feel before I’ll feel confident it’ll stand up in court.’

‘I thought you might say that.’

‘Let me sum up my reservations for you. You’re suggesting that Mike Ferris left Havana Bay at three in the morning and headed home and Sarah, who left almost an hour before, was waiting for him somewhere. He stops and gives her a lift and they drive back to Mannings Heath. On the way there, they stop at a lay-by beside the golf course and have sex and either because it was premeditated or something goes wrong, he turns violent and kills her.’

‘Yep, that’s about the sum of it.’

‘Oh, and I forgot to say, the next morning he has a pang of conscience or something and so he rings up and tells us where to find her body. So his motive is what?’

‘That he can’t control his temper and he wants rough sex but she doesn’t.’

He paused, thinking. ‘It sounds plausible but it’s all so…so circumstantial.’ An idea suddenly popped into his head. ‘We’ve spent all of our time looking for Sarah on CCTV footage, but what we should be looking for is Ferris’s car. What does he drive?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Ask him when you go back in, the make, model and colour and if he went home alone or if he was giving someone else a lift. If we can find his car in that area, if he indeed went home the same way as Sarah, and not through Hove or along the seafront, maybe we can also identify how many people were in the car. If that doesn’t square with what he’s already told us, that’ll be yet another lie and a good reason to hold him in the cells.’

‘She could have lying down in the back seat
, her head full of drink or drugs.’

‘Carol, you’re highlighting a problem that hasn’t surfaced yet. After you’ve taken a look at these CCTV pictures, let’s see what we know and what we don’t.’

‘Ok.’

‘It’s a bit late to have his car checked, I suppose.’

‘It’s been nearly a month.’

‘Nevertheless, we will need more than we
have already to take him to court. Pull it in and have it checked and if we find the slightest sliver of Sarah’s DNA, I’ll be a happier man. Do the CCTV check, re-interview his colleagues at Havana Bay and delve more into his relationship with Sarah by talking to her flatmates.’

‘Right sir.’

He paused for a moment, thinking. It was one of the oldest conundrums in the detective manual and one faced by dozens of coppers every week. Was it better to let a man like Ferris run free, safeguarding his human rights while the police gathered evidence against him, running a risk that he would do a runner or kill again; or to charge him with the crime and continue gathering evidence and face the possibility of public humiliation in the press and a likely damages claim for wrongful imprisonment if they had arrested the wrong man. It was a difficult decision but his mind was already made up.

‘Your ten-minute coffee break is well and truly up, DS Walters. Go back in there and find out what we want to know and
if you don’t get satisfactory answers, charge him.’

‘Right sir.’

He returned to his office surprisingly subdued for a man who had just arrested someone for the rape and murder of two women, but the nagging doubts would not go away. After first trying to inject a little spark of enthusiasm into his voice, he called up various members of the team out in the field and his boss and told them the news and then began to work on compiling a profile of Dominic Green.

He
walked into the Murder Suite for the de-briefing meeting at six, holding a pile of papers. There was loud cheering, clapping and self-congratulation from everyone as he walked across the floor, but they could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t happy and the celebration didn’t last long.

‘As you know,’ he said to the happy campers, ‘we now have Mike Ferris in custody but I must tell you, and this is not to be leaked to the press from this room under any circumstances, I am not one hundred per cent sure of his guilt.’

There were murmurs of dissent as they saw a celebratory booze-up down the pub evaporate l
ike warm breath on a cold night. He raised a hand to quieten them. ‘Even if it is subsequently proved that Ferris is guilty and I am forced to hang my head in shame and eat one of DS Hobbs’s hats as penance, we would be remiss and unprofessional if we didn’t tie up all the loose ends.’ In comparison with an unfunny comedian at the Edinburgh Festival, he was ‘dying’ as the response he was getting from his audience was zilch but like a true pro, he ploughed on regardless.

‘I am distributing
amongst you a list of names, which I want two-man teams to interview. These are either people that have voiced their displeasure at Dominic Green in the past and may still hold a grudge against him or a subscriber to his academic-babes web site with a serious criminal record.’

‘Are there any names on both lists?’ asked DC Bentley.

‘An interesting point Phil, yes there are two.’

‘Surely,’ DS Wallop said, ‘all we need to do is compare the names on these lists with the register of memb
ers at the West Hove or Mannings Heath Golf clubs and we would be home and dry?’

‘The guy we’re looking for may be a former member or possibly not even a member at all, but someone
that likes golf courses or,’ he said thinking of Mike Ferris, ‘someone that lives beside one. But no, there are no quick fixes. We’re doing this the old-fashioned way and in any case, face-to-face interviews usually throw up little gems of their own.’

After the meeting
, they crowded into cars and headed down to a pub in the centre of Brighton called the King and Queen. Uncharacteristically, as he liked nights like these when everyone was intent on having a big blowout, whether they had the right man in custody or not, he took the car as he was only staying for one drink as it didn’t feel right to be celebrating when in his view, the investigation wasn’t over and he wanted to go over to Hove and check on Rachel.