Bound, page 22
The troops were out visiting all known associates of Powell, Sandhurst and Mikey Chadwick, specifically looking for any that might happen to be of similar build to Jacob Sandhurst. I was on my way to a little rendezvous with Angela Powell, to bring her and Sheila up-to-date with what was happening on the case.
The only rain on our parade was the fact that Mikey Chadwick was still under sedation and was in no position to talk. I was very interested to hear what he had to say for himself.
I was about to ring Angela Powell to give her an update on events when my cellphone came to life in my hands. I saw the name on the display and smiled.
‘Gidday.’
‘Gidday yourself. So, what do you know?’ he asked.
‘That suddenly everyone is my friend; well, except The Boss, because he’s an arsehole, and besides Smithy, because he’s just damn grumpy.’ I was sure Paul would have added a little ‘and an arsehole’ under his breath. ‘What do you know?’
‘I was hoping you were going to ask that. Our boffins at ESR have done their magic and isolated a blood sample from Gideon Powell’s body that doesn’t belong to Gideon Powell.’
‘You’ve got my attention.’
‘The sample came from the bottom of Powell’s trousers. From the shape they think it was a flick from the knife as it was pulled out of his assailant.’
‘So Powell definitely had a go at his killer.’
‘Yup. So are you going to ask me who it was?’
‘They’ve got an ID?’ They must have done a DNA profile onall the samples in an attempt to spot the odd one out. That would have been a hell of an expensive exercise. But hey, I wasn’t paying, and it did the trick.
‘No, but I can tell you who it wasn’t.’
The boy liked to drag it out.
‘And?’
‘It wasn’t Jacob Sandhurst.’ Yes. Again, that feeling of vindication.
‘But we have a DNA profile?’
‘I’m thinking a warrant for Mikey Chadwick’s DNA will be in order,’ Paul said.
There was only one potential fly in Paul’s ointment. ‘I’ve seen his medical report. Mikey Chadwick has no cut or stab marks on him. He’s got injuries consistent with a beating, but there was no knife involved.’
‘Bugger. Well, there’s someone out there who had an almighty grudge against Gideon Powell and who’ll be nursing their wounds right now.’
The moment he said it a shiver moved down my spine. I could think of someone who fit both of those criteria, someone very close to home.
73
What the hell was I going to do? My heart felt disgust and dread and pity all in one. Surely he wouldn’t have taken matters into his own hands. Surely he wouldn’t have put everything on the line for a piece of shit who was, at that stage, going to be put away for murder. But then I thought about the timing. Powell had been murdered on the Wednesday night, literally hours after he had walked out of the station, giving us the fingers because we didn’t have the evidence to nail him at that time. He walked out a free man, and hours later he was dead.
‘Oh, Jesus, Smithy, what have you done?’ I whispered to myself.
And what was I going to do? This was one hell of an accusation to hurl against a fellow officer, and a friend. I tried to rub away the headache that was forming at my temples.
My agonising was interrupted by the sound of my phone.
‘Shephard.’
‘Sam, it’s Sheryl.’ My heart skipped a beat. ‘I think you should come down here now. I think it might be getting close.’
74
My brain was phasing in and out. I had the attention span of a gnat today. Every time the phone rang my stomach tightened into a dyspeptic little knot. The particular phone call I was expecting was inevitable and the wait intolerable. I had gone back to staring at photographs again.
‘Why are you here? You should be with them,’ Paul had said earlier.
‘I can’t,’ I had told him. ‘I can’t just sit and watch and wait for him to die.’ It seemed, at the last, Dad’s farming days were doing him a disservice. The man had been so fit and strong – he had the heart and strength of an ox. Now, despite his body fading away and realising it was time to call it quits, his heart just wouldn’t let up. Even Sheryl, who by the nature of her profession had seen a multitude of deaths, commented on how protracted this was and how cruel it was to let him continue suffering. I’d abandoned the bedside vigil around midnight, incapable of staying awake any longer and unwilling to hover, like a vulture waiting for the death.
My colleagues were out on the job. Those who did wander in and out of the room had the sense to leave me to my own devices. In an attempt to look like I was doing something constructive I had spread the pictures on the desk in front of me. I’d turned the pictures of John, or what was left of John, face down. There was something a little too close about looking at those pictures. Poor Jill. We’d taken stills from some of the video Declan had shot. They were low resolution and therefore a bit grainy, but they were still useful. One was of her as he had found her, tied to the chair, tipped on its back, clearly showed her dislocated shoulder. I felt my stomach give a lurch at the sight of it. The last picture in the series was of Jill’s hands tied behind the chair. Fortunately this picture was angled a bit better, so it avoided the gut-wrenching view of the shoulder.
She must have had a reasonable go at the ropes, because they didn’t look that tight and the knot was a bit agricultural and half-hearted. If she hadn’t tipped the chair over and landed on her back, she might have been able to work them off, given a bit of time. I placed my hands behind my back, wrist over wrist, and imagined what that would have felt like. My body gave a gratuitous shudder at the thought of it, and at the same time as my eyes fell on the photograph, a little cascade of dominoes tumbled and a stab of an idea pierced my brain.
75
‘What the fuck is going on here?’ DI Johns bellowed as he walked into the squadroom.
I just about gave myself whiplash as my head spun around to face him. My bowels developed a sudden urgency. I could see why he might be a little upset, considering he’d just walked into a room with three detectives, two constables and a receptionist tied to chairs, and a number of spectators.
I handed him a piece of rope. ‘Would you like to have a go?’
‘No, I bloody well would not. You’d better explain yourself, Detective, quick smart.’
My bright idea suddenly felt a little less vibrant, but I had to stand by my convictions.
‘I had a theory and I asked the others here to test it out. Call it an experiment. They have all tied their own hands together behind their chair. No one was allowed to look and see how the others had done it. They had to figure out the best way for themselves.’ I gave a little pause for effect. I’d learned that trick from him. ‘Anyway, the results are the same. Every one of them has tied themselves up exactly the same way. Have a look for yourself.’ He still looked at me like I was certifiable, but he took a cursory tour of the hands. ‘Which happens to be the same way as this.’ I handed him the still that had come from Declan’s filming of his mother. How cruel that the impulsive decision he’d made to record the horror of the crime scene would have such damning implications.
‘Jill Henderson tied herself up. She did it. She set the whole thing up. She murdered her husband.’
76
The seething anger had been building up all afternoon. How could I have been so gullible? There I had been, feeling sorry for the woman, for all she had been through. She had been so shocked, so traumatised and so apparently horrified by what had happened. And all along it had been a ruse. I’d trusted her. She had played me, played us all.
Despite my resentment I was still surprised when the door to the safe house opened and Jill Henderson stood before me. It was as if something had sucked away her vitality and she had diminished away to a fraction of her former size. She had made some effort with makeup but it did little to hide the shadows and lines that tracked across her face. She invited us in and guided us to sit at the dining table. There she curled in upon herself and proceeded to chew at the corners of what had once been perfectly manicured nails. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the gauntness of her face. All vestiges of her former beauty had disappeared, and all that was left was the shell of a woman clearly not coping with what she had done. She didn’t have post-traumatic stress disorder. She was suffering from guilt.
‘Declan, I need you to go out for a walk with the constable,’ I said.
‘Why, what’s happened?’ he asked. He hovered protectively beside his mum.
‘I need to have a chat with your mother alone. I’ll talk to you afterwards.’ He looked to Jill, who gave a little nod. Only then did he head towards the door.
I waited until it had closed behind him.
‘You know why I’m here, don’t you?’
She winced at the accusation in my voice and her eyes flicked to Paul seated beside me.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘Has something happened? Has there been a breakthrough in the case?’
I laughed, surprised by how bitter I sounded. ‘Yes, there has.’
I held up Declan’s photograph of her bound hands and dropped it onto the table before her. Then I held up a photograph of Paul’s hands bound behind his back and dropped it onto the veneer surface beside it.
‘We did a little experiment, to see what would happen if you gave someone a piece of rope…’ I held up a photograph of Detective Van Rij’s hands and dropped it on the pile; ‘…and asked them to tie themselves up.’
Then Detective Constable Richardson’s.
‘And you know what we found?’
Then Constable Johnston’s, then Constable Wilson’s, and then Laurie the receptionist’s.
‘Everyone did it exactly the same way.’
I picked up her photo again and held it in front of her face.
‘Exactly the same way as you.’
There was silence.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but her face became paler, her eyes wider. They stayed transfixed on the photograph. I banged it down onto the table and she looked at me with a start.
‘You killed John. Oh, you had us so convinced with your clever little scene. I especially liked the teabags stewing in the mugs. That was a nice touch, made it look so homey, so much like a normal night in with Hubby in front of the telly, minding your own business, until the big bad guys knocked on the front door and then blew your husband away.’
Her face went one step further, from sallow to semi-translucent, the blue of her veins a spiderweb beneath her skin. Large tears began to roll down her cheeks.
‘Except there weren’t any big bad guys, were there? There was just a very cunning and vicious little woman. A woman who wanted her husband dead, but didn’t want to have to pay the price. Wanted to walk away from it, looking like the poor, unfortunate, pitied widow.’
She still didn’t say a word.
‘But, you know, I don’t think it all went according to plan. I get how you would have worked up the courage to ram yourself into the kitchen counter, to make it look like a struggle – which must have hurt like hell – but I don’t think you expected to do your shoulder in like that, did you? And I don’t think you planned to almost suffocate to death, either. You didn’t envisage that. What happened? What went wrong?’ Despite trying not to show how bloody angry I was with her and how hurt I was, because goddamn it, I did feel hurt at being duped and taken for a fool, I couldn’t hide the bitterness in my voice.
‘Answer me!’ I said with more force than intended as I banged the table. I felt Paul’s hand carefully slide onto my leg under the table.
She jolted with shock, and for the first time looked me in the eye. ‘It was Declan,’ she whispered. ‘He was…’ She looked away again. ‘He was late.’
That only made it worse.
‘So you’re telling me you planned it so your son, your own son, would come home and find his father dead. That he would come home and have to see…’ I stumbled with my incomprehensibility of it all, my arms gesticulating wildly, trying to convey the horror of it; ‘…to see that. Jesus Christ, Jill. His father’s brains were splattered all over the fucking room. You wanted him to see that? You planned it? You made it so that the last memory that boy would have of his father was that? You fucking bitch.’ I shouldn’t have said it, but I couldn’t help it. Even Paul gasped.
‘I didn’t think it would be so, so messy,’ she said, still whispering. ‘I had no idea it would be like that. I never intended for it to be like that.’ She was shaking her head, the tears snaking down her face.
‘You didn’t think that sticking a shotgun point blank at someone’s head and pulling the trigger would make a mess?’
‘No, not like that. I never intended to do that to John.’
‘Then why the hell did you shoot him?’
‘I did it for Declan.’
Like hell she did. And what gall. Even now she was trying to palm off some of the responsibility, lay it at the feet of the poor boy.
‘What do you mean, you did it for Declan?’
‘It was to protect him. I was just trying to protect him. It was John’s fault. He wanted Declan to get into the business, to be a part of it. Not the legitimate business – his other empire, that other bloody evil empire. He even introduced him to those … those monsters. Those scum.’
‘So you were there? When Gideon Powell and Jacob Sandhurst came to the house?’
She nodded. ‘They didn’t see me, they wouldn’t have known I was there. John didn’t realise I was home, but I saw him; he let our son meet criminals like that. He wanted Declan to become one of them and I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t let our boy become a part of that. I just couldn’t. I had to do something.’
‘So you thought you’d take care of John and the monster scum at the same time? Planted the evidence, set the scene. Gave us a pretty good description of the men, but not too good, so there would be some doubt – couldn’t make it too easy for us. No one would ever suspect the only eyewitness, the poor, injured eyewitness, was lying her arse off. I’m taking it they were sloppy and left bits of themselves behind at your house – the gloves, hair.’
‘It was all in John’s workshop, in the rubbish bin. They must have been looking at samples of the drugs. He had those drugs in our home. I couldn’t believe he brought things like that, people like that, into our home. With our boy there.’ Her voice was a whisper.
‘So you took their leftovers, their rubbish, planned this whole thing, set up the crooks to take the fall and then calmly blew your husband’s head off. Jesus Christ, most people would have just asked for a divorce.’
She laughed, and a hint of the bitterness cut through her façade. The kind of bitterness that could bring a woman to do such a thing. ‘It wasn’t that simple. God, I wish it had been that simple. But I had to assure Declan’s future, our future.’
Somehow it always seemed to come down to money. ‘The insurance?’
She looked down at the floor and wouldn’t meet my eyes.
‘You do realise your little ploy resulted in the death of two more men. That you are responsible for the deaths of Gideon Powell and Jacob Sandhurst, men who were innocent of this crime. It’s not just your husband’s murder that should be on your conscience.’
Her shoulders started to shake and she appeared to be working hard to stop herself from breaking down completely.
‘Christ, you must have really hated your husband to do that to him.’
She took a shuddering breath. ‘But you don’t understand. It was the hardest, most awful thing I’ve ever had to do. I loved John, he meant everything to me, but I had to protect Declan.’ She was pleading now. ‘You have to understand, I loved John.’
She had a damn strange way of showing it.
77
I’d just helped solve a complicated and nasty murder, uncovering a clever and brilliantly executed plot, but it felt such a hollow victory. Two men had died unnecessarily, I had grave suspicions about the actions of one of my colleagues, many lives had been turned upside down, and for what? A mother’s misguided protection of her son? That was at one hell of a cost. And, ironically, Declan had lost both parents now. Jill had achieved nothing. Add to that the fact that he was now having a hard time grappling with the enormity of what his mother had done, and that his footage of the crime scene had provided the evidence against her. He felt guilty, and he had no reason to. His mother had done that to him – she had left him with that legacy.
My hands drifted down to rest on my still-flat belly, trying to connect to the secret life within. What would you do for love? Could love, no matter how misguided, cause you to break the greatest rule of humanity? Thou shalt not kill. In Jill’s case, yes it did. My mind drifted to my suspicions about Smithy’s involvement, something I wasn’t sure how to address, even if I wanted to. My head said I should, but my heart couldn’t cope with the thought right now. The whole affair had left me feeling disheartened and drained. I slouched back in my chair and stared out the window at the cars and people on the street below, and wallowed in an almighty attack of the blahs.
I was pulled out of my reverie by the ring of the phone. I pulled myself upright and picked up. ‘Shephard.’
I heard a long shuddery intake of breath and felt my heart sink.
‘Sam, it’s Mum.’
78
My fingers drifted down along his cheekbone, traced the shape of his nose, up to between his brows where the frown had finally erased. His skin was papery beneath my fingertips. Already he felt cool, too firm to the touch. But he looked asleep, at rest, tucked into the bed, arms over the blanket at his sides. My other hand felt the bones of his, the sharp swell of knuckles beneath his skin, a stark reminder of how frail he had become.
