Relentless (31 page)

51

At the station, I was given a cup of strong black coffee and told
that the body of Irene Tyler, my formidable mother-in-law, had
been discovered in the bedroom of the house where Kathy
had grown up. We'd never got on, as I've already said, but the
news still hit me hard. Harder, I think, than I would have
expected. It was one more tragedy in a twenty-four hours that

had been full of them. They wouldn't tell me how she'd died,
just that they were treating it as suspicious.
After I'd finished the coffee I was taken to one of the interview
rooms, where a male and a female detective wanted to
hear everything that had happened to me since my release from
custody the previous evening. They said that as soon as I'd
finished I'd be taken back to London and reunited with my
children. 'What about my wife?' I asked, but they wouldn't
answer that one, so I let it go, and just told them the whole story.
Occasionally they stopped me to request certain details or to get
clarification of one of my points, but for the most part they just
let me talk, expressing no obvious scepticism at my version of
events, even when I told them how I'd shot at Lench in self
defence, wounding him in the foot. I thought they'd ask me
more about the detective and how he'd come to kill Lench, but"
they skirted around that particular topic, so I volunteered the
information that the detective had chased him and that Lench
had been armed, adding that neither Kathy nor I had seen
what happened after that. I hoped that this way I was helping
him.
As for Kathy's role in the whole thing, I told the truth, mainly
because I didn't see any alternative. I said she'd been having an
affair with Jack Calley and that he had given her the key to a
safety deposit box which apparently contained something from
one of his clients. Other people had clearly been very interested
in getting hold of it, and had tortured then murdered Jack in an
effort to find the box's location. They'd then come after Kathy
and me, and had finally caught us.
'And you have no idea what the safety deposit box contained?'
asked the female detective, a DI in her forties with a
severe haircut that didn't match her personality.

'It's something you can make copies of,' I said, remembering
Lench's earlier interrogation of Kathy.
'And do you think your wife knows?' pressed the female
detective.
'No,' I answered, but in reality I wasn't so sure.
'What about the client? Have you any idea who he, or she,
might be?'
I shook my head. 'The only names I was given were Daniels,
the undercover cop; Mantani, who was one of the people who
kidnapped me; and Lench. He was the one who got killed this
morning.'
'How do you know he was killed?' asked the male detective, a
much younger guy with a very high hairline and the air of
someone who felt sure he was going places a lot more important
than a provincial copshop. He reminded me a little of my boss,
Wesley 'Call me Wes' O'Shea. A smug, self-righteous go-getter
who, if he'd been in the military, would undoubtedly have been
shot by his own men.
'The detective who rescued us told me at the scene.'
The two of them turned to each other, then back to me. I
looked at my watch. It was ten past eleven. I'd been in this room
for three quarters of an hour and I was suddenly exhausted.
'I've told you everything I know,' I said wearily. 'I just want to
see my kids.'
The female detective nodded. 'OK. Interview suspended at
11.11 a.m.'
'By the way,' I said, 'before you turn the tape off I just want to
say that my wife did not have anything to do with Vanessa
Blake's death. The man who attacked me in the library, and who
was armed with the murder weapon, killed her.'
'We'll let the investigating officers on the case know your

comments,' she told me sympathetically. 'Thanks very much for
your co-operation.'
I nodded and shook her outstretched hand. The male
detective didn't bother putting out his. It was clear he didn't
believe everything I'd told him. Well, fuck you, laughing boy,
believe what you want. When you'd been through what I'd been
through in the past day, it took more than some fast-track
graduate with a sharp suit and a cocky attitude to scare you.
When I was outside in the main reception area, I sat down on
one of a row of empty seats to wait for the lift back to town
the female detective had promised me. The place was quiet,
courtesy, I suppose, of it being a Sunday morning - not a peak
time for criminal activity. No-one was being booked in and there
was only the odd hooded delinquent hanging around, waiting
to be seen by his bail officer. I remembered that I'd started
smoking again, and experienced an unwelcome urge for a
cigarette, although even if I'd had any it wouldn't have made any
difference. This part of the station was non-smoking, which
seemed a little unfair to me. The least you could offer a person
you were incarcerating, potentially for some time, was a smoke
to ease them through the situation.
'Mr Meron, how are you doing?' said a voice nearby, interrupting
my thoughts.
I looked up to see DCI Rory Caplin, one of the two men
who'd interviewed me about Vanessa Blake's murder, seventeen
hours and a lifetime ago. His red-grey hair was looking even
more dishevelled than usual and he was dressed casually in
jeans and a black leather jacket that was too short to be fashionable.
'I'm
here to give you a lift over to the hospital to see your
kids,' he said with the kind of sympathetic smile I'd been getting

from people all morning. On him, though, it could just about
pass for genuine.
I yawned. 'I'm surprised they're using a man of your seniority
for that.'
'My colleagues are interviewing your wife, and doing a fine
job of it. I've got to get back to the station, and it's on the way.'
He had his keys in his hand. 'Come on. I've got a lot on today.'
'Have you found the guy who attacked me in the library yet?'
I asked as we walked out together through the main doors.
'Not yet, no. We haven't had any witness sightings of him
either, and we've already taken a number of statements.' He
made little attempt to hide the scepticism in his voice.
'I'm not making it up, Mr Caplin. I was attacked by a man who
was holding the murder weapon. The filleting knife you showed
me yesterday in the interview.'
'The one with your wife's prints on it. Yes, I know. But the
answer remains that we haven't found him yet.'
We walked towards Caplin's car. It was a green-gold Toyota
saloon with plenty of mud stains up the sides. He unlocked it,
and we both got inside. It smelled of air freshener and smoke.
'Have you found any other clues that might lead you to the
killer?' I asked.
'Yes, we have,' he said, starting the engine and pulling away.
There was a silence.
'Care to elaborate?' I said eventually.
'Vanessa Blake was having an affair. We discovered correspondence
at her house that suggested very strongly that she and
her married lover were going to be moving in together in the
very near future.'
'And have you questioned him yet?' I asked as we pulled out
onto the road.

'We're questioning her now,' he answered, and this time the
expression on his face really did convey genuine sympathy. 'I
hate to have to say this, Mr Meron, but the lover in question was
your wife.'

52

Mike Bolt had interviewed dozens, scores, hundreds of criminals
down the years and he knew every interrogation technique
backwards. Just like, he suspected, the man he'd killed an hour
earlier. The secret was to believe the story you were telling. And
if you go over it in your head enough, you will do, even if it's a
lie. And what Bolt was saying was definitely a lie.
When they brought him to Reading police station for questioning
- he wasn't actually arrested, but realistically he'd had
little choice in the matter - his interrogators, men from Reading
CID, had questioned him repeatedly about his version of events,
trying to sound like they were his friends, but also trying, like
any good coppers, to find holes in his story. But he'd stuck to it
like glue. The man he'd shot - armed, and dressed in a balaclava
- had jumped through the kitchen window and fled through the
garden of the property and into the field beyond. Knowing that
the suspect had a gun and was prepared to use it, he, Bolt, had
picked up the Browning with the silencer that Tom Meron
had allegedly fired in an exchange of shots with the suspect, and
given chase. Because the suspect was already wounded, his

progress was slow and Bolt had quickly got to within a few yards of him. At this point they were in the field and he had already
shouted to him twice to drop his weapon. The suspect had then
swung round, gun in hand, looking as if he was going to shoot.
Bolt, still moving, had fired off a round that had caught him in
the belly. However, the suspect was still upright and pointing his
own weapon in Bolt's direction, so he'd come to a halt, taken
aim and fired again, this time hitting him in the head. The
suspect had fallen and, hearing the arrival of police reinforcements,
Bolt had walked briskly back in the direction of the
house to call for first aid.
It was a plausible enough sequence of events, and with Bolt
making no mistakes in his recounting of it, the interrogating
officers had no grounds for further action. It was an extremely
unorthodox situation however, and no-one in the British police
service likes those. He was informed that the matter had been
referred automatically to the IPCC, the Independent Police
Complaints Authority, and that he would have to make himself
available to them whenever they wished to speak with him. He
told them that he understood all that, and was advised to remain
in the interview room because his boss from the NCS, DCS
Steve Evans, had just arrived at the station and would shortly be
on his way over to speak to him. He took the cup of coffee on
offer, his third, and waited.
He didn't feel bad lying, but he did feel depressed that he'd
been put in a position where he'd had to kill a man, essentially
in cold blood. He felt a sense of shock at what he'd done
because ending someone's life, however much they might
deserve it, is always a terrible act that hits any man with a
conscience very hard. You have destroyed someone, taken away
every dream, emotion and memory that person ever had. It was

an awe-inspiring thought, and for Bolt perhaps even more so, as
it went against all his training as an enforcer of the law. But
it had been done, and he hoped that as a result two innocent
lives had been saved.
They hadn't told him whether or not the Merons' children had
been freed safely, and he hadn't asked, because in his version of
events he hadn't spoken to the gunman, but his gut feeling was
that they were OK. No criminal wants to murder two young
children unless he absolutely has to. The fall-out is simply too
great. But Bolt hadn't wanted to take the risk. He told himself
once again that he'd done the right thing. He kept repeating it.
Staring at the coffee and repeating it over and over in his mind.
You did the right thing. He deserved it. You did the right thing.
There was a knock on the door and DCS Evans came into the
room. He was a short, compact man in his late forties with a
well-groomed military-style moustache. Even today, on his day
off, he was sporting a neatly pressed suit, shirt and tie. If either
his first or last names had begun with a D he would forever have
been lumped with the prefix 'dapper', but Dapper Steve didn't
have much of a ring to it, so he remained plain old DCS Evans.
Bolt had met him on several occasions and was confident that,
unlike a lot of the senior figures in the police service, he had the
best interests of his men at heart, and was prepared to stand up
for them. Which, under the circumstances, was no bad thing.
Bolt stood up as he entered and they shook hands. The DCS's
grip was only one rung down from painful, his palm dry.
'Hello, Mike,' he said, looking Bolt squarely in the eye. 'Bearing
up?'
'Just about. It's not a lot of fun being on the wrong end of the
questions for once.'
Evans moved past him and took a seat at the other end of the

table. Bolt took a sip from his coffee. It was tepid and weak, but
he took another sip anyway.
'It's always a tough call having to make the decision to pull
the trigger,' said the DCS. 'Very few of us ever get put in that
position. Even fewer get put in it twice.'
Bolt didn't say anything. There wasn't a lot he felt he could
say. He knew that as a young man Evans had served in the
Falklands, and was a veteran of the battle of Goose Green,
where he'd undoubtedly had to make the decision to pull the
trigger, so at least he wasn't spouting the usual 'I feel your pain'
bullshit you got from some of the Brass.
'Because this is the second fatal shooting incident in your
career,' Evans continued, 'and because you were using an unauthorized
weapon when you opened fire, there's going to be
even closer scrutiny of your actions than would otherwise be the
case. The PCC are going to be going over your story again and
again. You've got to be prepared for that.'
'I'm prepared, sir,' said Bolt. 'I didn't do anything wrong.'
'I'm not saying you did, Mike. In fact, I'm sure you didn't.
You've had an unblemished career spanning seventeen years,
and you're a hugely valuable member of our team. But not
everyone thinks like we do, and at the moment, given the
circumstances, I've got no choice but to suspend you from duty
on full pay.'
Bolt shook his head angrily. 'Don't do this to me, sir. You
know how long the investigation'll'take. Those bastards don't do
anything quickly. I could be off duty for months. Years even.'
'Once the air's cleared, we'll petition to put you back on the
job, but we've got to be seen to be acting decisively.'
'The guy was armed. He was pointing a gun at me. What the
hell was I meant to do? Stand there and let him use me for target

practice, so that everyone could turn round afterwards and say
what a hero I was for acting with such restraint? He can be
proud of himself except, oh shit, he's dead.'
'Listen,' said Evans, sitting forward and raising his voice, 'my
sympathies are with you, Mike. They are. I've got no doubt the
bastard deserved it. There you are, I've said it. But that's my
personal opinion, not official policy, and my job, unfortunate
though it may be, is to follow official policy. I'm sorry, but that's
the way it is.' He sat back again and sighed. 'I'll do everything I
can to get the suspension lifted over the next few weeks, so bear
with me, OK? In the meantime, have a rest, and make sure you
have a federation representative present whenever you talk to
the PCC. Co-operate, but don't make it easy for them.'
Bolt was surprised by his words. Not because the DCS's
opinions were particularly controversial, but because he was
prepared to speak his mind, and you didn't get that very
often from senior officers. Most of them believed one thing and
spouted another. He was also relieved that Evans was coming
out so obviously on his side.
'OK,' he said, 'I'll have a rest, but I don't want to be resting
for too long. We've got a lot of work to do.'
Evans nodded. 'One other thing I think you ought to know,'
he said. 'Because of the tangled nature of this case, the NCS
are taking overall control of it. We're now in charge of the
investigations into the murders of Jack Calley and Vanessa
Blake, and all the other investigations linked to it, including the
suicide of the Lord Chief Justice.'
'And I'm not going to be a part of it?'
'As soon as I get you back from suspension, you'll be involved.'
'I know as much as anyone, probably more than anyone,
about what's been going on. You need me.'