The Domino Killer (7 page)

Claire Mason stared at the floor, her jaw set, tears streaming down her cheeks. �She glanced across to the photographs of her sons. ‘How am I going to tell them?’

Sam didn’t answer. Instead, he said, ‘How have things been between you and your husband?’

Claire glared at him, swiping her hand across her face to take away the tears. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’

‘Your husband was found in a park in Stalybridge. We need to know why he was there. I know this must be hard for you, but we need to find out what happened. When did you last see him?’

‘A couple of days ago.’ She spoke quietly.

‘Why that long?’

‘We’d had a row.’

‘Enough to make you leave?’

‘Things haven’t been good recently, that’s all. It can’t have anything to do with whatever happened to Henry.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because it was just something between him and me. Something private.’ She jabbed her finger towards the framed photographs. ‘Those boys will spend the rest of their lives thinking about Henry, wondering what the hell had gone wrong. I am not going to soil his name by discussing our private lives.’

‘But if it catches his killer?’

‘It won’t bring him back!’

‘Where did you stay?’ Charlotte said.

‘Am I under suspicion?’ Claire said, incredulous.

‘We’ve got a jigsaw to build,’ Charlotte said. ‘We need to take all the pieces from the different parts of his life to recreate his final week. Somewhere in that jigsaw might be the answer to how he was killed. But we need every piece.’

‘I stayed with my sister, Penny. You’ll be wanting her details, just to prove I was there.’ She curled her lip as she said it, but then gave her sister’s address. ‘I’ll need to call her, to tell her.’

‘No, don’t, let us do that,’ Sam said.

‘But who’s going to pick up the boys? They’ll be out shortly.’

‘There’ll be someone along to sit with you. You’ll be able to go to the school and meet them. You don’t want them finding out from someone else.’

Claire nodded. Her attention had switched to protecting her children.

Sam exchanged glances with Charlotte, who said, ‘Did Henry know a man called Keith Welsby?’

‘I don’t know,’ Claire said. ‘He didn’t tell me everything.’

‘Do you know him?’

Claire thought for a few seconds before shaking her head. ‘No, never heard of him. Who is he?’

Present tense, Sam noticed. No slip-up at the dead teacher. If Claire had been somehow involved with Keith Welsby, she’d know he was dead. Sam didn’t think she could fake not knowing so soon after finding out about her husband.

Unless, of course, she’d known about that too.

‘He worked at St Hilda’s Catholic School,’ Sam said. ‘He was murdered a month ago.’

‘What’s that got to do with us?’

‘It’s just something we need to find out.’

She shook her head in exasperation. ‘No, no connection. We’re not Catholics, our children don’t go to that school, wherever it is. I’ve never heard of the man.’

‘Did your husband keep a diary or calendar?’

‘There’s one on the back of the kitchen door, but there’s not much on it.’

Sam went through. It was hanging from a hook, hair appointments and school inset days scrawled on it in black ink. He turned the page to the month before, to the night of Keith Welsby’s murder. There was an entry:
H away, car show
.

Sam took the calendar back into the living room. ‘Do you know where he went then?’

Claire looked at it. ‘Something in Birmingham. A trade show or something. He goes every year.’

And a good alibi, Sam thought. All he had to do was show up, check in and slip back to Manchester to kill Keith Welsby. The place would be busy, and a trade show and hotels means booze. Recollections get muddled, times get forgotten.

‘Where did he stay?’ Sam said.

‘A Travelodge somewhere. His boss sorted it; you’ll have to ask him.’

A car pulled up outside, followed by a knock on the door. When Sam answered, it was Eddie, a detective from the squad.

‘Hi, Sam. How is it in there?’

‘Like you’d expect. You the FLO?’

‘Yes,’ Eddie said. ‘Brabham likes my soothing tones.’

Sam was pleased. Quiet and unassuming, Eddie played the hand-holding role well, but he was sharp. Experienced, heading towards retirement, he’d spot anything untoward, any whispered telephone conversations. After all, a family liaison officer isn’t just there to comfort the bereaved. They’re looking for clues all the time, teasing out confidences.

‘Anything happening?’ Eddie said.

‘No,’ Sam said. ‘She’s defensive, so there are some secrets, but his death appeared to be a shock.’

‘But the secrets could be connected.’

‘Don’t let her speak to her sister. We’re heading there next. You know how it works with false alibis: they breakdown in the detail. Let’s see how her sister’s account squares up with Claire’s.’

Sam went back into the living room and made the introductions. Charlotte got to her feet and lifted the large plastic sack containing Henry’s laptop and the family desktop computer. They’d seized them as Claire cried out her grief. If there were secrets to be found, the computers were the best place to start.

Charlotte said her goodbyes, Sam too, as Eddie ushered them out, reassuring them both that he had it under control. If there was going to be a revelation that would solve the case, Eddie was the one who wanted to tell everyone.

When they got back in the car, the computers on the back seat, Charlotte said, ‘What do you think?’

‘There’s something going on. Whether Claire Mason will say anything is a different thing. She’s tough. We need to go back to the Incident Room with something. At the moment, we’ve got two murders that are connected, but I can’t think of anything that connects them.’

‘So let’s get these computers dropped off at headquarters and see what big sister has to say.’

Joe’s hands were balled into fists as he walked quickly along the street from his office.

He was still certain about Proctor, the spark of recognition as keen as it had been at the police station, but the lack of anything between Proctor and Gina had thrown him. Gina had never mentioned any suspects, so that wasn’t a surprise, but Joe had expected something from Proctor. There’d been press conferences, appeals for information. Gina had been on television; there was no way Proctor wouldn’t have known who she was.

But Joe knew deep in his gut that he was right. He had to decide what to do with this knowledge, but needed to be surrounded by noise. His apartment offered only silence, and in the quiet he would be alone with his thoughts. He didn’t want that. His thoughts frightened him. He wanted to feel the buzz of the city.

Joe loved Manchester. He had been brought up in its suburbs but it was the noise and strut of the city centre that enthralled him. From the swagger of its musical history, embedded into the bars and clubs squeezed into grime-soaked railway arches, to the dirty scars of its industrial past, Manchester dragged its memories with it. The centre had once been squalor, with families squeezed into small rooms to serve the factories that turned the canals black and the air thick with smoke, but now glass and steel towered over ornate Victorian buildings, the distant skyline interrupted by the vast brick mills that once hummed with the sound of cotton looms.

Joe loved everything about the place, even the threatening undercurrents, the surliness, all against the backdrop of rumbling cabs and the electric screech of the trams.

A pub on the other side of St Ann’s Square was often a magnet for him. Inside it was dark, the wooden bar dominated by rows of glasses hanging from a rail. Men stood along it in small clusters, mostly in suits, talking out the working day, although the solitary ones wobbled on their feet, the day coming to another soaked and lonely end.

Joe ordered a pint of bitter and sat down at a table. Old photographs of the city hung on the wall next to him and the daylight glowed through the doorway against the dimness of the bar. The pub calmed him usually, the stresses of a day in court forgotten in the slow pleasures from a pint glass. Today it wasn’t having the same effect. He took a drink but it tasted sour. His fingers tapped out a rhythm on the scuffed wooden table.

He was about to walk out and leave his drink behind when someone pulled out the chair opposite. It was Gina.

He was surprised. ‘You weren’t long with Mark Proctor.’

‘His decision, not mine,’ she said. ‘He seemed like he wanted to be elsewhere.’

‘Am I this easy to find?’

‘You were only ever going one way,’ she replied. ‘Can I join you?’

He wanted to say that he’d rather be alone, but it wasn’t true. ‘It looks like you already have,’ he said.

Gina went to the bar to get a drink. She returned with a glass of wine and put her suit jacket over the back of the chair. As she crossed her legs, her skirt rode up, revealing toned and bronzed legs. Two men at the bar glanced over. Gina was fifty-three and she looked great.

‘You all right?’

He closed his eyes as he fought the urge to tell her about Mark Proctor, about his long-held promise to kill Ellie’s murderer. She would stop him, tell him to call the police, but that didn’t seem enough. He’d never wanted an arrest. He wanted revenge.

‘Yes, sorry,’ he said. ‘Just not feeling myself today, that’s all.’

‘Mark Proctor said he thought you were going to throw up last night.’

Joe didn’t respond, so Gina said, ‘What is it, then? A bug or something?’

‘Must be.’ He smiled, although it was thin, never reaching his eyes. ‘I’ll be fine, don’t worry. What did he say about his car?’

‘Nothing much. He wouldn’t go into details. I probed but he didn’t seem keen on sharing. If the police want to interview him again, he’ll need to stay silent.’ She frowned. ‘It’s a weird one, though. Why would he break into a compound to steal back his car, only to torch it?’

‘You’re the ex-detective,’ he said. ‘Why do you think?’

‘Because he had something to hide? His car was pulled over and impounded because it was uninsured. If there was something in the car he didn’t want to be found, why not just get some insurance and remove it?’

‘What was his car worth, though?’ Joe said. ‘A couple of grand? He’d rack that up in fees at the compound fairly quickly, so he’d never get to keep the car. It might just have been spite, nothing more, that he wouldn’t let them have it.’

‘He could have just walked away from it,’ Gina said. ‘They wouldn’t get their money at all then. It would become just scrap value.’ Then she laughed. ‘But since when did our clients do anything sensible? They wouldn’t be clients if they did.’

‘Don’t you think that Proctor is different to our normal client?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I don’t know…’ Joe paused. ‘There’s just something about him that I can’t quite work out.’ He took a drink and stared at the table.

‘So what’s on your mind?’ she said.

‘Perhaps I’m just feeling reflective.’

‘You don’t do reflective, Joe. You work hard and then you have fun. You’re a two-mood man. This is something different. You came here with the look of a man determined to get drunk.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I’d like to think it’s your love life, but you don’t have one, as far as I know.’

That made Joe smile, despite himself. Gina played the part of a scolding big sister. ‘I do all right,’ he said.

‘Whatever happened to that pretty prosecutor? Kim?’

‘She made up with her fiancé. She’s getting married next month.’

‘That’s a waste,’ Gina said. ‘I thought you were good together.’

‘We were all about bad timing,’ Joe said. ‘I see her at court. We’re friends, but that’s all it will ever be.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard the mantra, that you don’t do infidelity, even where you’re just the bit on the side.’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ he said. ‘I’m at a difficult age.’

Gina laughed. ‘I wish I was at the same difficult age. Try mine.’

‘I’m thirty-five,’ he said. ‘It seems like everyone is either attached or has children.’

‘Is having children that bad?’

‘No, of course not, but I can’t just drift into their life and then out again. Uncle Joe shows up for a few weeks and then he’s gone.’

‘God forbid you actually fall in love with someone,’ she said. ‘And you’re not in here because you’re moping about your love life. I brought that up. It’s something else.’ A pause. A tilt of her head. ‘Talk to me.’

Joe took another drink, the beer going down too easily, leaving foamy rings on the glass. ‘I’ve been thinking about Ellie today, that’s all.’

‘You think about her all the time. Why has it brought you down today?’

‘Sometimes it just does.’

‘Okay, I think I understand,’ Gina said. ‘I’ve never lost a brother or sister like that, but I can imagine how it never goes away.’

‘It’s not the pain,’ he said. ‘That fades in time, like a nerve that hurts only when something jabs it unexpectedly. No, it’s the anger that never fades. The injustice, that whoever killed her is still out there, that he hasn’t paid for what he did.’

Gina flushed. ‘I’m sorry about that. I’ve gone over and over it so many times in my head, but honestly I can’t think of anything we missed.’

Joe reached out and put his hand over Gina’s. ‘I’ve never blamed you for not catching him. Not once.’

‘Thank you, Joe, but I blame myself, only because I can’t change it, and you deserve for it to be so different.’

‘There is one thing, though,’ he said. ‘Time has passed and I can handle things better. I want you to be honest with me about something.’

‘Go on.’

‘Was there ever a suspect? I know you’ve always said that there wasn’t, but I don’t know if you were holding stuff back, just to make me feel better, or because the police say things like that.’

Gina sighed and shook her head. ‘We looked into a few who lived locally, but some had alibis, and the others? Well, we needed evidence and there wasn’t any. No eyewitnesses, no forensic evidence.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Whoever killed her got lucky.’

‘So if something new came up, like a name, would there be anything to link it with? Any scraps of DNA? You remember how it was with the Yorkshire Ripper, that once they knew who he was, they realised they’d spoken to him.’

‘Not that I remember,’ Gina said. ‘The investigation started as a blank sheet and pretty much stayed that way. We spoke with some of the known sex offenders, just hoping they would feel guilty enough to confess, but there are so many out there and we couldn’t chase every one. It would frighten people if they knew, but at times it felt like there was a predator on every corner. Over forty thousand people on the register, Joe. Over two thousand in this county alone. How the hell could we trawl those? And they’re just the ones we’ve caught. All we could do was knock on a few doors and hope that someone said something incriminating, but that never happens. We don’t even know if it was a sex attack.’

‘She was dragged into the bushes and her knickers torn off, for Christ’s sake, Gina!’

‘Hey, calm down, Joe. I’m only telling you what we know, and that is we’re pretty sure she wasn’t raped. There was no semen on her, no injuries down there. Her torn knickers could have been a distraction.’

Joe closed his eyes. He wanted to say that it had to be a sex crime, because he’d seen a man follow her, the man Gina had spoken to minutes before, but he stopped himself. Gina had confirmed what he suspected, that there was no point in telling the police about Mark Proctor. If there was going to be justice, he had to do it his way.

‘Ellie became just another number,’ Joe said. ‘Another dead child.’

‘It feels like you’re blaming me.’

‘I’m not, I told you.’

‘Thousands of kids go missing every year,’ she said. ‘We ended up putting them into categories. Which ones were probably runaways. Which ones were probably dead. Most turn up again, even if they end up in short skirts working for some shitbag under the railway arches, or giving handjobs in exchange for cigarettes. The others will be buried somewhere, and we know we’ll never find them. Some can never be found. Girls like Ellie are the exception, not the rule, because we know what happened to her.’

‘That would be worse, if she’d been taken and not found,’ Joe said. ‘I would have spent all my life looking for her. At least we had something we could learn to deal with.’

‘What made you think of her?’ Gina said.

‘Just one of those moments where she jumps back into my life,’ he said, and drained his glass. ‘I’m going now. If I stay, it will turn into a long session, and I don’t want that.’

As he manoeuvred his way out of his seat, edging around the table, Gina touched his hand. ‘Joe, if you need to talk, you know where I am. I know when something’s on your mind. You don’t hide it well.’

He swallowed. He found it hard to look her in the eye. He gave a quick smile and a nod.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and went for the door.

Once outside, it was as if he couldn’t hear the noise of the city any more. He could see nothing beyond Mark Proctor. He’d always promised himself what he would do if he found Ellie’s killer. Now that he’d found him, he was letting Ellie down by not following through on it.