The Chameleon's Shadow (22 page)

‘God knows. Companionship . . . self-esteem . . . a misplaced maternal instinct. The best thing Mags could do is walk out now and return to wherever she came from.’ Irritably, Jackson snapped the locks on the BMW. ‘Avril’s a classic controller. She manipulates people by giving them what they want. Like Ben’s mother. That’s the way
she
operates.’

‘You didn’t take to Avril, then?’

Jackson gave a grunt of amusement as she opened the boot and put her case into it. ‘I wouldn’t trust her further than I could throw her. Would you?’

‘No,’ said Acland with a hint of irony as he opened the driver’s door for her and stood back, gesturing for her to climb in, ‘but I don’t know the first damn thing about women.’

Jackson arched a sardonic eyebrow. ‘You don’t know much about this one. Do I look as if I can’t open a car door for myself?’

He stepped back immediately. ‘Sorry. Force of habit.’

‘The last man who insisted on treating me like a piece of Dresden china was my grandfather,’ she said idly, taking off her jacket and tossing it on to the back seat. ‘I was sixteen years old and taller than he was, but he decided I should find out just once in my life how it felt to be treated like a lady. He made a big deal of helping me into his clapped-out Peugeot.’

‘Sorry.’

She put her foot on the sill and rested an arm along the top of the door. ‘He told me lesbians lead miserable existences, particularly the masculine-looking ones. People snigger at them behind their backs.’

Acland stared doggedly over her shoulder, wondering where this was leading. ‘Is he eating his words now?’ he asked cautiously.

‘I wish he was. He died a couple of years later. It’s one of the reasons I went into medicine. He had a perfectly treatable disease that went undiagnosed because his GP was a moron and the waiting lists were so long. Colon cancer,’ she explained. ‘By the time the poor old boy was referred to a specialist, it was too late.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, lowering herself on to the seat. ‘He was definitely one of the good guys.’ She fired the ignition and gestured towards the passenger side. ‘Are you getting in?’

Acland shook his head. ‘I’ll make my own way back.’

Jackson studied him for a moment. ‘Any particular reason why you don’t want to drive with me suddenly?’

‘I could do with the exercise.’

She smiled slightly. ‘You shouldn’t make eye contact when you tell a fib, Lieutenant. That stare of yours is a lot more expressive than you think.’ But she didn’t try to persuade him out of whatever he was planning to do. With a brief nod, she slammed the door and engaged her gears.

As she drove away, she watched in her rear-view mirror as he crossed to the opposite pavement and set off back towards the squat.

T
HE NEWS
,
LATE ON
Wednesday afternoon, that Walter Tutting had emerged from his coma was greeted with relief by the inquiry team. Progress on Kevin Atkins’s mobile had been painfully slow. The last incoming call, prior to Jackson’s, was from a pay phone at Waterloo station, and a half-hearted hope that the booth might produce results so many weeks later was quickly shattered when information came through that it was cleaned daily. Jones refused to authorize a forensic examination. ‘We might as well dig a hole and pour money into it,’ he said grimly.

Over sixty entries in the address book had been followed up without success. The majority of contacts were friends, family or business acquaintances, most of whom had been interviewed and dismissed at the time of Atkins’s murder. Of the remainder, fifteen, including three male prostitutes, all ex-army, had since accounted for themselves.

Four names remained to be checked but in each case the user’s mobile number had been disconnected. They were logged under the single-word tags of ‘Mickey’, ‘Cass’, ‘Sam’ and ‘Zoe’, but with no ideas of possible surnames from the Atkins family, the team was waiting on a data-search of the server’s files, with a warning that results could take days if multiple servers were involved. Even then, there was a good chance the numbers had been registered to companies, which would involve further time-consuming interviews.

The small hope the police had had that the phone had been used with a different SIM card after it was taken from Atkins’s house also came to nothing. As did the saliva DNA from the mouthpiece, which proved to be the victim’s. In answer to Detective Superintendent Jones’s question, ‘Why would the killer carry Atkins’s mobile around in public?’ the psychological profiler shook his head and said it didn’t make any sense to him.

‘Is that the best you can do?’

‘For the moment. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single convicted serial killer who carried his trophies with him. The usual MO is to secrete anything incriminating inside an area he controls . . . usually his home. You’ll have to give me a day or two to research it.’

Jones leaned forward. ‘Supposing the boy made a mistake? Supposing he stole the phone from the woman? Would that make a difference?’

‘In what way?’

‘Women are very protective of their bags. If my wife wanted to hide something, particularly something small, she’d drop it to the bottom of her bag and carry it around with her.’

The psychologist shrugged. ‘How sure are you that the lad who stole the phone was telling the truth?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Then I’d talk to him again before you hare off in a different direction. The most obvious reason for a person to be walking around with trophies is because there was nowhere else to put them.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Your killer might be part of the homeless community.’

Arranging another interview with Ben Russell had taken twenty-four hours, and Jones was out of patience by the time the boy’s solicitor agreed to make himself available at five o’clock on Wednesday.

‘Criminals have too many bloody rights in this country,’ he grumbled to Beale as they drove to the hospital. ‘We’d have the story out of the kid in half a second flat if he didn’t have guard dogs to protect him.’

‘We’d have
something
out of him,’ Beale agreed, ‘but I wouldn’t bet on it being any more truthful than what he’s told us already.’ He broke off as a call came through for the superintendent, smiling when the man punched the air. ‘What’s up?’

‘Tutting’s regained consciousness.’ He tapped in his secretary’s number. ‘Lizzie? Change of plan. I need you to get hold of Ben Russell’s solicitor and tell him we’ll be running late on the boy’s interview. Yeah . . . yeah . . . I know he’s a pain in the arse . . . so tell him I don’t give a damn whether he’s there or not. The kid’s lying through his teeth and we both know it.’

* Jackson gave a startled jump when Acland disengaged himself from a shadowy recess between two buildings halfway down Murray Street as she approached her car. She hadn’t seen him since driving away from the squat the previous day and, by his unshaven appearance and crumpled shirt, he looked as if he’d slept rough overnight. He certainly hadn’t returned to the pub. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded angrily. He was dangling his jacket over his shoulder in a 1930s-style affectation that didn’t suit him. ‘Hitching a ride,’ he said. ‘Where have you been? What have you been up to?’ ‘Just walking.’ ‘For thirty bloody
hours
?’ she said scathingly. ‘Give me a break! Daisy and I have been worried sick. You’re damn lucky the police didn’t decide to question you. You’re supposed to stay put at the pub.’ ‘Sorry.’ He walked round the BMW to open the door for her while she put her case in the boot. ‘If I’d realized it was going to upset you that much, I wouldn’t have done it.’ ‘I’m not upset, I’m angry.’ ‘Whichever.’ He pulled the door wide. ‘It was your night off. I thought you and Daisy could do with some time to yourselves. She makes it pretty clear she doesn’t want me around.’

‘So now it’s Daisy’s fault?’ said Jackson grimly, stalking after him. She wrestled the door out of his hand. ‘Get in,’ she snapped, ‘and stop behaving like Little Lord Fauntleroy. As far as I’m concerned, he was a nasty little brown-noser in a silly suit with a deeply insipid mother . . . and I’m not that easily sidetracked.’

But she was. It certainly didn’t occur to her to question why he chose to open the door behind her and toss his jacket across the back seat.

Nor did she pursue the issue of what he’d been doing, although it wasn’t clear to her afterwards whether it was her choice or Acland’s to steer the conversation towards his mother. She had tried for the last few days to encourage him to talk about his family and his sudden willingness to describe his relationship with his parents took her by surprise.

‘If it takes an insipid mother to produce Little Lord Fauntleroy, then you’re confusing me with someone else,’ he said idly, attaching his seat belt. ‘There’s no way you could describe
mine
as insipid. In any case, courtesy was drummed into me at school and Sandhurst. Manners maketh man . . . and all that crap...but I’ve never understood why women are allowed to be as rude as they fucking well like.’

Of course Jackson was intrigued, not least because she’d come to recognize that the lieutenant was a puritan. He rarely used vulgar language unless he was angry. ‘You think I was rude?’

‘Yes.’

‘I come from the wrong side of the tracks. You’re looking at the last of a long line of working-class grafters who talked in glottal stops and never had an even break in their lives.’ She flicked him a mocking glance. ‘There wasn’t much cause for my ancestors to say thank you to anyone. They had it programmed into their genes to bow and scrape to privileged types like you.’

‘You haven’t done badly out of it,’ he said curtly. ‘At least your grafters sound genuine. I don’t even know what privilege is except that you get sent away to school at eight so that your parents can claim some cachet from it. Appearance is everything in my family.

As long as the surface passes muster, it doesn’t matter how much

dirt is being churned up underneath.’

‘What kind of dirt?’

‘Anything that lets the side down. My father’s father was a chronic alcoholic – he was drunk twenty-four seven – but my mother told everyone he had Parkinson’s disease. I was scared shitless of him when he was in a rage. He kicked one of our dogs to death in front of me when I was ten. I was too frightened to say anything... but I really hated him for it.’

‘Did he hit your grandmother?’

‘Probably. She left him after my father was born. I never met her – I don’t think Dad did either.’

‘What about your mother’s parents?’

Acland shook his head. ‘I’ve never met them. As far as I know, there was a massive falling out around the time she married my father. They emigrated to Canada . . . but I don’t know which came first, the falling out or the emigration. Mum used to fly off the handle every time they were mentioned . . . so no one speaks about them now.’ He leaned forward to massage his temples. ‘She’s likely to—’ He broke off abruptly.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you get on with her?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Should I take that as a no?’

‘She likes her own way. I sometimes wonder if that’s what caused the row with her parents. If they disapproved of Dad, they might have tried to stop the wedding.’

‘What’s to disapprove of?’

‘Maybe they thought he’d turn out like his father.’

‘Did he?’

Acland shook his head. ‘The opposite. He’s spent his whole life trying to make up for my grandfather’s failings.’

‘In what way?’

‘Mortgaged the house and the farm up to the hilt to pay off the old man’s debts and try to make a go of it. He had a dairy herd until the milk prices dropped and he found it was costing more to produce the stuff than he was being paid for it. I tried to persuade him to sell up at that stage, but—’ He broke off on a shrug.

‘What?’ asked Jackson.

‘The silly old fool went into sheep instead. There’s too much debt hanging over the place. The best he could afford after the mortgages were cleared would be a cheap brick box on an estate somewhere.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Mother wouldn’t like it.’

Jackson smiled slightly. ‘Not grand enough?’

‘Something along those lines. It wouldn’t be worth it anyway. She’d be at war with the neighbours in seconds.’ He stared out of the windscreen. ‘Dad earns just enough out of the flock to allow them to stay there, but it’s all very precarious.’

‘Does your mother know that?’

‘I doubt it. She’d make my father’s life hell if she did.’

* Jackson thought of the conversation she’d had with Robert Willis that morning when she’d phoned to say Charles hadn’t returned. ‘Would he have gone to his parents?’ she’d asked. ‘I can’t see it. He and his mother don’t get on, although I’m not so sure about his relationship with his father. He talks more sympathetically about Mr Acland . . . usually to do with the farm and the amount of work the man has to put in.’ Willis’s dry smile travelled down the wire. ‘Mrs Acland seems to be a lady of leisure . . . and I think that offends Charles.’ ‘What about the girlfriend? I know you said there was no love lost between them, but would she take him in for old time’s sake?’ ‘Jen? Can’t see that either, I’m afraid.
She
might go along with

it, but I can’t see Charles even asking. Does she know he’s staying with you?’

‘Not that I’m aware of. There’ve been no phone calls for him . . . and he keeps to his room when he’s not out at night with me.’

‘Even when he’s not sleeping?’

‘Yes.’ Jackson sighed. ‘He seems to have a problem with Daisy and it’s making life rather difficult. He cuts her dead if he bumps into her by accident and it’s upsetting her.’

Willis hesitated. ‘What sort of personality is she? Friendly? Affectionate?’

‘Very. I’ve been wondering if he fancies her.’

‘I wouldn’t think so. I’d say it’s more likely he’s afraid she fancies him. He has real difficulty interpreting women’s motives.’

‘Because of the girlfriend?’

‘Because of the relationship, certainly. He talked about signing up to a fantasy. I interpreted that as meaning that he expected to settle down with Jen and live happily ever after . . . but it didn’t work out that way.’

‘Why not?’

‘He never told me,’ Willis said, ‘but I can make an educated guess. For a number of reasons – principally because Jen allowed her true character to emerge, I suspect – Charles became disillusioned with her.’ He paused. ‘She tried to persuade me it was her choice to end the relationship, but I don’t think that’s true. I’m ninety per cent sure it was Charles who pulled out when he realized how angry she was making him.’

‘You said he put his hands round her throat in the hospital. Had he ever done anything like that before?’

‘I’m guessing the abuse escalated during the latter part of the engagement. Jen has issues of her own which may have provoked it.’

‘What kind of abuse?’

Another hesitation. ‘I only know of one other episode. Jen described a particularly vicious rape to me and I’m confident that it did in fact happen. Charles is clearly ashamed of something in the relationship and rape seems to me the most likely cause. I’m guessing Jen used sexual favours to manipulate him – offering them or withdrawing them at whim – which is why he finds women difficult to read.’

Jackson allowed a brief silence to develop before she spoke again. This was information she hadn’t been given before. ‘So let me get this straight,’ she murmured with a touch of irony. ‘If Charles wasn’t given sex at the time that he wanted it, he took it by force?
Then
. . . not liking the person he was becoming, he ditched his fiance´e and is now too ashamed to talk about it? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Not exactly. I think you’re embellishing what Jen told me. She spoke about
one
rape. I believe it happened as I indicated earlier . . . an escalation of abuse, culminating in a single episode of forced sex. After which, Charles cut all ties with her.’

‘Bully for him!’

‘Maybe so, but don’t assume that Jen’s blameless. As a couple they’re completely incompatible – in
every
way – and it’s my opinion that Charles tried to extricate himself as soon as he understood that.’

‘You’re making a lot of assumptions in his favour,’ said Jackson acidly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘Because there’s no evidence to support Jen’s allegation. Charles hasn’t admitted anything.’

Jackson wasn’t impressed. ‘It’s one thing to wish a rapist on to
me
– he’d have a job working up the energy – but quite another to put Daisy in his way. What if he mistakes a show of friendship for a sexual advance?’

‘That may be why he’s avoiding her,’ Willis said matter-offactly. ‘He doesn’t want to be drawn into another relationship based on flirting.’ He amended the sentence immediately. ‘I’m not suggesting that your partner seeks anything other than friendship – nor, indeed, that Charles does – but he’s intensely suspicious of women who use physical contact to demonstrate empathy.’