Bad Sons (Booker & Cash Book 1) (7 page)

Detective Inspector Sprake kept me waiting nine minutes by the clock in the interview room where I’d wasted part of my life the previous day. It still reeked of vomit and guilt.

Cash seemed unusually taciturn compared with our previous interactions – professional and distant. I didn’t press her for conversation. If she wanted to practise the silent treatment, that was fine with me. I was used to it: I was married.

When the man himself finally deigned to put in an appearance he didn’t apologise for keeping me hanging around. He didn’t thank me for pitching up voluntarily and saving him a drive. He didn’t smile or introduce himself. He sat down opposite me and kept me waiting a minute longer while he pretended to be reading a piece of paper tucked in the usual beige file and I stared at the top of his head. It was no more interesting than the painted block wall behind him.

Sprake was a cod of a man: indifferent, grey, protruding cod eyes; featureless cod face; a cod mouth with a natural inclination to gape, no chin to speak of and a forehead that slanted back from his weak brow a little too sharply. The overall effect was of something bred for the sea not the land: aquadynamic. He was almost completely bald and short. Like most short men, I sensed he wore about him like a cheap shawl the air of someone who wished he were six inches taller and naturally resented anyone who was. I was. And more.

When he thought he’d impressed me enough with his importance, he looked up and snagged my eyes with his dead gaze. ‘Mr Booker.’ A cold fish.

It didn’t sound like a question, so I didn’t answer him. He’d lost my goodwill and any natural deference I would harbour for his position. As an interrogator he could have been his own worst enemy.

‘You know why you are here?’ That did sound like a question.

‘Only that you wanted to see me.’

He flicked his empty eyes up at Cash. ‘We want to talk about your aunt’s death and your uncle’s disappearance.’

‘Good. Me too.’

‘How was your relationship with both of them?’

One thing you could say for the man, he got straight down to what was on his mind.

‘What? What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘It might have a lot to do with it.’

The room seemed suddenly smaller and hotter.

‘You are joking?’

He shook his head from side to side slowly fixing me with those dead cod eyes, like something dying on the hook. ‘By your own admission you were back in Dymchurch about the time your aunt is believed to have drowned. We’ve confirmed you flew in to Heathrow when you said you did and we’ve traced the taxi driver who drove you to your relatives’ home. That’s all nice and neat for us. So we have opportunity.’

I sat stunned by his theory and his homework. ‘I don’t believe this. You seriously think that the moment I arrived in Dymchurch I attacked and killed my relatives?’

‘It’s possible, Mr Booker. Like I say, you had the opportunity.’

‘Possible and stupid. With that kind of reasoning anyone in Dymchurch at the time could have killed them if being around is all it took.’

‘Why do you say
them
, Mr Booker? Only your aunt is dead.’

‘You still believe that? My uncle’s been missing for thirty-six hours without a word. He’s dead.’

‘We’ll remember you volunteered that. What did you do when you got home and found the place empty?’

‘I already told Detective Cash.’

‘Well, now I’d like you to tell me.’

‘I hung about the house, went to the pub to see if they were there, came back home and fell asleep on the sofa. I didn’t wake up till the morning.’

‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that neither of them were there and you had had no word of them?’

‘Of course it did,’ I said, injecting as much incredulity at the idiotic comment as I could muster. A thought occurred to me. ‘I phoned them on both of their mobiles several times while I was travelling down from Heathrow to Ashford. Check their phones. Check mine. You’ll see that none of my calls was answered.’

He thought about that before changing tack: ‘You didn’t report either of them missing for how long?’

‘I called the police the following morning. I was told I couldn’t officially report either of them missing until twenty-four hours had elapsed. Ask your Detective over there.’

He looked at her and she confirmed it with a nod; something else that had been checked up on.

In the quiet pause that followed I said, ‘What would be my motive?’

‘I don’t know. Why don’t you tell us? Got any money problems? We can easily find that out.’

It could have gone one of two ways. I could have exploded at him, told him what I thought of his dim-witted policeman’s logic and got myself some trouble, or I could see it for what it was – a man without a clue poking at snakes – and rise above it.

Despite my strong inclination to push away from the table and tell him what he could do with his theory, I calmed myself with a deep, stabilising breath. ‘I understand that you are just doing your job. I also understand that you either don’t care, don’t have the time, the energy or the vision to look any further than that wart on the end of your nose for answers to my relatives’ disappearances. So why don’t you go back to your comfy little office, shuffle some paperwork and leave the search for answers to someone who gives a shit? Next time you want to speak to me you can drive out to Dymchurch.’

I did get up then. Let him see my height and resent me for it. I shot a dirty look at Cash – I had thought she’d been OK. I always had been a lousy judge of women – and walked for the door.

‘Got quite a temper on you still, I see, Mr Booker,’ said Sprake, not moving.

I stopped and turned to face him. I noticed Cash push herself upright from the wall.

‘What was that?’

He tapped the file on the desk in front of him. ‘Actual Bodily Harm it says in here. Your employers know about that, do they? I didn’t think there was a school anywhere that took on teachers with criminal records. Maybe Turkey just hasn’t caught up with the rest of the civilised world, yet. Maybe I’ll give them a ring and ask.’ He smiled nastily at me.

I bit my tongue, hated him and left.

I wanted to slam the door behind me. I wanted to kick a hole in the plasterboard corridor wall. I wanted to punch the first face that looked at me.

I walked out into the fresh air and with a couple of deep lung-cleansing ins and outs swapped it for the fetid foul gas I’d been breathing for the last twenty minutes.

Well, if the police weren’t interested in finding out what really happened to my relatives I was. And my reasons had nothing to do with acquitting myself from any half-baked suspicions of some lazy bastard detective who wasn’t worthy of his office. One thing I did know: Sprake couldn’t have been even half-sure of himself. He’d let me go.

***

11

I drove home the longer, less busy way – the same way Detective Cash had driven me home the previous day.

Opposite the Hotel Imperial in Hythe I pulled off the road into a parking area with access to the beach. The sun had finally broken through and it was almost warm.

I crunched over to the shingle shoreline for a smoke and a stare at the great heaving mass of secrets in front of me. Now the sea kept secrets from me. I waited and watched and listened.

The greater the distance of time and space I put between the police and me the calmer and more rational I became. I needed to be. I needed to be thinking clearly. Anger and aggression wouldn’t be any help.

I smoked two cigarettes, got nowhere with my thinking, went back to the car and drove slowly home.

*

I was making a sandwich when my mobile rang. It was Detective Cash. I was tempted to ignore her but rose above that childish inclination.

‘Yes.’ I tried injecting my disappointment, resentment and sense of betrayal into the single syllable.

She wasn’t interested in my feelings. ‘Mr Booker?’ Who did she expect it to be?

‘Yes.’

‘Are you at home?’

‘Yes.’ I was conscious of being monotonous and monosyllabic.

‘Can you come downstairs and let us in then, please?’

That got me. Still holding the phone to my ear I crossed to the kitchen window. In the otherwise deserted car park and at the entrance to the back gate two vehicles were parked: a white panel van and the car Cash drove around in. She was standing looking up at me, phone held to her ear. There were three bodies suiting up in the white coveralls of Scenes of Crime Officers. She saved me the question.

‘I have a warrant to search these premises.’

I didn’t respond. I terminated the call and, trailing my outrage and anger behind me, went down to let them in. I unlocked the back door and went through it to stand on the pea-beach. I heard car doors opening and closing, men talking in low voices then pairs of feet crunching across the gravel. Anonymous figures carrying little cases and bags traipsed past me without making eye contact. They walked in like they owned the place.

‘Wipe your feet, will you?’ I called to their backs.

I turned to see Cash finish a phone call and then walk towards me. She held my gaze.

‘This your idea, is it?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think I spend my life being perpetually disappointed and fooled by people who I should know better than to give the benefit of the doubt and my trust.’

It was quite a speech and, perhaps, a little harsh, but I had some repressed anger to take out on someone and she was in the way. Her jaw tightened a little and her lips pursed.

‘It’s his theory and he’s the boss. I don’t have to agree with him but I’m not stupid enough to get in his way.’

I hadn’t finished being petulant. I wanted to let her know I didn’t think much of her for holding out on me while we had waited for Sprake. ‘Thanks for the heads-up at the station by the way, Detective.’

‘Don’t be obtuse, Mr Booker. It doesn’t suit you. If I’d told you what to expect, you think he wouldn’t have seen it in your face. You don’t appear to have a talent for hiding what you’re thinking. And then where would that have left me? I have to work with him. Besides, if you had nothing to hide there wasn’t going to be a problem, was there? At least there wouldn’t have been a problem for you if you hadn’t jumped up on your high horse and ridden away.’

I took my rebuke like a man. ‘So what’s your theory?’

She looked at me levelly. ‘I don’t have one, Mr Booker. Yet. I try to resist the urge to form them until I have had a chance to gather the necessary evidence and information, intelligence and facts, and then examine it all and shape a logical, reasoned opinion. Don’t make the mistake of thinking all police officers think the same way.’

I took that for some kind of code that she didn’t share her senior’s view of events.

‘So why are you here?’

‘I’m here because I have a job to do and if you were to come out from behind your indignation and arrogance and try to be a bit more objective about this you might just see that, if you have nothing to hide, a thorough forensic search of the property could be to your advantage.’ That was quite a speech too.

Despite myself and my ‘indignation and arrogance’ I had to smile at her for that. She didn’t smile back. She didn’t have to.

‘All right, Detective. Do your duty then. When you’ve finished, I’ll be out here trying to work out what really happened to my relatives.’

She didn’t move. ‘Don’t you want to know about the injuries to your aunt’s arm?’

I was paying attention.

‘There were none. Nothing consistent with her receiving a battering from the tide and the physical features of the beach, anyway; nothing to suggest she’d been thrown hard against the concrete outfall or the ironwork when she got hooked up on it. The pathologist was actually interested in her injuries, or rather the absence of them. He did find some bruising to her upper arm, suggesting she might have been recently roughly handled, but nothing else other than the evidence she had recently struck her head, of course.’

She gave me a moment to let that settle.

‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t it strike the pathologist as odd? You remember you said yesterday that if she’d gone into the water at Dymchurch then she’d have been in the water for some time. There’s a lot of sea wall, scores of groynes and the outfall that she could have been thrown against by the tide. I remember you also said you’d be surprised if her body
didn’t
show signs of her having been battered by the sea and the geography of the place.’

‘Yes, I did, but just because she wasn’t knocked about doesn’t necessarily prove anything, does it?’ She breathed out heavily. ‘You seem like you could be capable of intelligent thought, Mr Booker, so why don’t you start reasoning a bit more and stop letting your own unsubstantiated theories cloud your ability for objective thinking? Is it odd that your aunt’s body hadn’t sustained any nasty injuries? Maybe. Is it suggestive? Possibly. Conclusive? No. The information is something to bear in mind. Something to store away. A part of the puzzle. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a job to do.’