Everyone Lies (48 page)

Mr Tanford,’ his solicitor warned, but Tanford shrugged him off.

‘Marta and I were friends; we had sex.’

‘She was bound, beaten, and whipped with a riding crop. She was raped and choked,’ Simms said. ‘Her face was unrecognizable. She drowned in her own blood.’

The solicitor looked up from the sheet and glanced uneasily at his client – this was leagues away from the marital indiscretions he was used to dealing with – but Tanford held Simms’s gaze without blinking. None of what she’d said had any effect on him.

‘I left Marta safe and well at the Henrys’ sauna,’ he said. ‘Your own witness statements say that one of the brothers left the pub early.’

She nodded. ‘It’s true, the pub landlord saw Frank Henry leave at 11.30 – a half-hour before George Howard and Sol.’

Tanford smiled and folded his arms.

She flicked back through the pages, to a point she had highlighted in bright fluorescent yellow. ‘That would be a minute or two
after
you made a call to Frank Henry.’

‘Marta told me she was going on to a party with the Henrys,’ Tanford said smoothly. ‘She asked me to ring Frank to let him know she was ready. I can’t vouch for what happened to her after that.’

‘Oh, you are a slippery bastard,’ Fennimore murmured. Tanford knew they couldn’t pinpoint the moment of Marta’s death. It was his word against the Henrys’, and Tanford was relying on his word weighing heavier than that of two lowlifes who peddled drugs and sex. And he was probably right.

‘DC Parrish told me that Marta called him on the night she was murdered,’ Simms said. ‘She was in a restaurant with “Rob”. That’s you, Detective Superintendent Tanford. She believed she’d seen an exchange between you and the Henrys – drugs for money. An hour or so later, she sent DC Parrish a text. She knew you were police. Is that what set you off? Did you find her sending the text?’

Tanford gave his solicitor a bewildered look. ‘I honestly have no idea what she’s talking about.’

‘All those months of pain – the humiliating loss of standing with your criminal business associates – it was all her fault. For men like you, women who sell themselves for sex are disposable, but all the time you were screwing her, she was screwing you. That must have been devastating. You went berserk.’

Tanford watched her as though she fascinated him. ‘Is the lack of physical evidence making Spry nervous?’ he asked. ‘I expect it is. How long d’you think you’ll be allowed to continue with this outrageous line of questioning before he calls a stop?’

Fennimore spoke again. ‘Talk to him about the whip.’

She told Tanford they’d found a riding crop in the search of his house.

‘Souvenir of my hunting days.’ He smiled. ‘I always did enjoy a good hard ride.’

Simms nodded slowly. ‘We thought it was important – nice antique like that – your type does like to keep souvenirs.’

‘Type?’ Tanford said.

‘Sadistic, narcissistic, controlling.’

Tanford bristled. Simms sneaked a look over her shoulder and Fennimore caught the glint of triumph in her eyes. ‘I think you kept the same riding crop
all these years
, as a souvenir. Who knows what stories it might tell?’

Rage boiled behind the flat surface of the superintendent’s eyes, but it took him only a second or two to get it under control.

‘Any dom/sub games I play are consensual.’ The pink tip of his tongue appeared between his teeth. ‘Marta was shy at first, but she really got into the whipping. Must be a sibling thing – Rika couldn’t get enough of it.’

‘Her sister was addicted to heroin – she’d do anything to feed her habit.’

‘Hm,’ Tanford said. ‘Shared needles and shooting up in filthy dosshouses – HIV and hepatitis are a very real risk. Which is why I bleach my riding crop after I’ve used it. Well,’ he said with an expression of insincere concern. ‘You have to protect the submissives.’

Fennimore smiled to himself. ‘I told you, Kate – cops never know as much as they think they know.’ Simms drummed her fingers on the table; she was telling him to get on with it. ‘Most modern riding crops have a fibreglass core, but this one, being antique, is whalebone. Ask him if he knows how long the plaited leather is on a riding crop. It’s almost twenty yards – imagine that, tightly wound round and round a whalebone core.’

As Simms relayed the information, Tanford’s head swivelled to look up into the camera in the left-hand corner of the ceiling.

‘Whalebone – or baleen, to give it the correct name – is fibrous and striated,’ Simms went on.

‘I can see your lips moving, but those aren’t your words coming out of your mouth,’ Tanford said. ‘
Striated
– d’you even know what that means, Katie?’

‘If you look at baleen through a microscope, you see microscopic tubules,’ she went on. ‘Less than half a millimetre in diameter—’

‘Oh.’ Tanford clapped his hands together, a delighted grin on his face. ‘Now I
know
you’re there.’

‘—but wide enough to trap hundreds of thousands of blood cells. Baleen is really
very
absorbent.’

Tanford grinned manically. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are …’ he taunted, but Fennimore saw fear behind the hilarity.

‘So even a good wipe down with bleach wouldn’t destroy all of the evidence,’ Simms finished, untroubled by his baiting.

Tanford kept his gaze on the camera. ‘Why don’t you just come in and join us, Professor? We’ll talk of many things – shoes and ships and all that. Did you know that Lewis Carroll drew Alice with dark hair? Those original drawings looked a lot like your Suzie – d’you think she followed the White Rabbit down the hole?’

‘Detective Superintendent,’ Simms said.

He looked past her, addressing Fennimore directly. ‘I worked Vice before I took the step up to Drugs. I saw hundreds of girls like your Suzie.’

Fennimore didn’t doubt it. He knew the numbers heart and soul, and he knew the chances of finding her alive. That was the problem with understanding the odds – they said that Suzie was never coming home. That she was dead. That if she hadn’t died in the first three days after her mother was murdered, she would wish she had. The odds said that before Suzie died she was used in horrible ways by men who acted without compunction, who functioned with no understanding of compassion or morals, and who had no conscience about what they did. Men with no pity in their hearts – only the most warped and deviant species of desire.

Tanford watched him avidly. ‘Suzie was ten, wasn’t she? The paedos love the ten-year-olds – they dress them up like princesses and fuck them like Lilli Dolls.’

Fennimore’s heart slowed.

Tanford winked. ‘Very realistic sex toys those Lilli Dolls, but silicone is no substitute for real warm human flesh.’

Fennimore couldn’t breathe.
He’s taunting you because you’ve got to him. Don’t rise to it.

‘Of course the shine goes off them fast; they end up being passed from hand to hand, or bed to bed, losing value with every sale.’

‘Mr Tanford,’ Simms said. ‘I’m warning you …’

‘Chief Superintendent,’ the solicitor said simultaneously.

‘What’s the problem?’ Tanford said. ‘He sent her image out into the homes of a billion strangers because he
wants
to know what happened to her.’ His gaze was still locked on the camera. ‘You won’t find her that way, Fennimore. You need contacts – an “in” on the networks. Someone to unlock a few doors for you. That man might be me.’

‘DCS Tanford appears to be referring to sexual offences relating to a missing child of which he has personal knowledge,’ Simms said.

Tanford paused, wrinkled his nose. ‘But thing is, I don’t like you very much.’

‘Tanford, I really must insist that you
stop
,’ his solicitor said.

‘I’m suspending this interview,’ Simms said. She gave the time and date and reached to press a button on the wall console.

Tanford’s hand snaked out and gripped her wrist solidly. ‘Don’t do that, Katie – I’m trying to help.’

‘Let go of me,’ Simms warned.

Tanford pulled her forward, standing now.

DC Moran moved around Tanford and grabbed his free hand, forcing his right arm behind his back, pushing him down onto the table. With her free hand, Simms hit the alarm strip which ran at waist height around the wall. The siren whooped. His solicitor tried to reason with him.

Fennimore couldn’t move. He had always told himself that he’d never given up, but over the years the idea had become an abstract thought – Suzie in some kind of hinterland. But what Tanford proposed was real and horrible, and he felt a paralyzing sickness.

‘Tell you what, Fennimore,’ Tanford yelled over the wail of the alarm and the shouting. ‘I’ll help you if you stand as forensic advisor in my defence.’ He waited, his eyes flicking quickly to the door and then away again. ‘No? Don’t care enough? Can’t say I blame you – it’s probably too late, anyhow. I looked in some of those kids’ eyes and I swear, there was nothing left – they’d forgotten they
had
any other use—’

Fennimore tore off his headset. He covered the distance to the interview room in a few strides. Simms grabbed the back of Tanford’s head and dragged him forward, across the table. He released her wrist and Moran quick-cuffed him, his arms behind his back, Simms barring Fennimore’s path as he opened the door. He lunged at Tanford, but Simms shoved him hard.

‘Nick,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’

Moran set Tanford down in his seat. He stared at Fennimore, panting and grinning like a wolf.

‘He’s bluffing,’ Simms said, her hand on his arm. ‘The man’s a sadist, Nick – this is what he does.’

‘Are you sure of that?’ Tanford said. ‘Like I say, I was in Vice. I’ve had close dealings across three police forces with traffickers.’

Simms and Moran together forced Fennimore backwards out of the room as four officers piled in from the corridor.

‘Give me a bell if you change your mind, Fennimore,’ Tanford shouted.

Simms sent Moran back into the room with one of the uniformed officers and sent the rest away. She led Fennimore a few steps down the corridor and pinned him to the wall.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before she could really get started. ‘It won’t happen again.’

‘You’re dead right it won’t, because you’re not going anywhere near him again.’

‘Kate, come on,’ he said.

‘What would be the point – he’d just use it as a chance to psychologically torture you.’

He wanted to argue, but he knew she was right.

‘We’ll just have to go with what we’ve got,’ Simms said. ‘Without Marta as a witness to speak for herself most of the evidence for her murder is stacked against the Henry brothers anyway.’

As well as Marta’s blood and a small fragment of her nasal cartilage the CSIs had turned up in the luxury suite at their massage parlour, there was forensic evidence of the Henrys at Marta’s dump site – a paint spill in the alley had been matched to a splash inside the wheel arch of Sol Henry’s Lexus. Video clips on Marta’s F: Drive at the university showed Sol and Frank Henry making arrangements for drug drops and restocks from their office at Francine’s.

‘When the cell site comes through I can have another go at Tanford. It might even place him at the dump site. But until then, the brothers are in the frame for the murder.’

‘And Tanford is more than willing for them to take the fall,’ he said.

Her eyes gleamed. ‘Maybe I’ll tell them that – see how they take it.’

49

The Henry brothers would take whatever the law threw at them for the drugs offences, but they were not about to sit quiet on a murder charge for a scummy cop who’d wrecked their business with his twisted sexual preferences and then tried to shift the blame onto them. Simms went through the long list of evidence against them, first with Sol, then with Frank, and Tanford’s claim that he left Marta safe and well at their massage parlour. As if by some kind of telepathy, they both started talking.

Frank, surprisingly, was the most forthcoming.

Tanford was supposed to drop Marta off at George Howard’s place after the meal so she could start work at Georgina’s. But Tanford rang, panicked. Said he’d killed Marta. Frank left Sol and George Howard at the pub and went to find out what had happened.

‘You and your brother were both at the murder scene,’ she said. ‘And we’ve tied you in to the dump site as well.’

Frank showed no emotion. ‘We just helped him to clear up.’

‘And where did George Howard fit in?’

He shrugged. ‘Putting George Howard in the frame was a bit of a windfall – what you might call an added bonus.’

‘How did you get him to cooperate?’

‘Quaaludes,’ he said. ‘Why he couldn’t remember nothing.’

‘What about Candice?’

He frowned, confused. ‘What about her? She doesn’t work for us no more. Pity really – she were a good worker before Tanford got to her.’

‘Candice is dead, Mr Henry,’ Simms said.

‘Is that right?’ He ran a finger down the groove running from his nose to his mouth. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to tell you how to do your job, but you might want to take another look at Tanford for that.’

In a meeting room at Collyhurst Station, Ella Moran, Kate Simms and Nick Fennimore watched Marta Aizupiete and Detective Superintendent Tanford having sex. The location had already been identified by Frank Henry as the ‘luxury suite’ at Francine’s massage parlour. He had given clear directions to a self-store locker in Salford, where he had stashed a hard drive containing what he termed ‘security footage’.

Simms caught the tech’s eye and jerked her chin. He fast-forwarded to the moment when Tanford swung off the bed, naked, and disappeared around a corner. He moved carefully, with the slight overcompensation of a drunk. A second or two later, they heard the cascade of water; Tanford had turned on the shower.

A faint clunk – the shower door closing – then Marta slid from the bed and slipped into a white silk kimono. She was lithe and beautiful and she carried herself with grace.

‘People thought she was a ballet dancer,’ Simms said out of nowhere.

Marta picked up a clean towel from a rack of shelves and, looking directly into the camera, she dabbed her neck and throat.