Merciless: a gripping detective thriller (DI Kate Fletcher Book 2) Page 2

  ‘Get yourself back here,’ he interrupted. ‘I’ve got one that definitely is for us. Woman called an ambulance this morning to attend to the death of her father. Once the body was removed she confessed to his murder. She’s in Interview Three and she’s asking for you.’

  2

  Raymond was waiting in his office when Kate got back to Doncaster Central, and he didn’t look happy. His complexion, usually flushed, looked like he’d been standing too close to a fire and his huge hands flapped irritably at his side like the flippers of a particularly dangerous prehistoric creature.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he asked as soon as Kate entered the room. She took an involuntary step back as if the spray of his spit might be an acid attack.

  ‘The canal. Just outside the town centre. Sam Cooper found a body this morning.’

  ‘I know that! I meant since I rang you. I’ve been waiting.’

  Kate looked at her watch. She had spent another few minutes with Sam, then checked on Hollis, filling him in on her conversation with Raymond before finally grabbing one of the SOCOs and asking him to email her the photographs of the disturbed gravel. She wasn’t entirely convinced by Cooper’s theory but the evidence could support it. She’d asked to be informed immediately if the woman’s bag turned up, or her missing boot, and she’d left Hollis at the scene in case any form of ID was found.

  ‘I…’

  Raymond pointed at a chair and sat down at the desk that dominated the small room. His bulk reduced the space even further and Kate couldn’t help but wonder if he’d chosen the desk deliberately to intimidate anybody that he invited into his office.

  ‘Look, put that on hold for now. I’m sure your team can deal with it. I need you to talk to the woman who was brought in an hour ago. She’s admitted killing her father but that’s all she’ll say until she sees you.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Caroline Lambert.’

  It didn’t ring a bell. ‘And why does she want to talk to me?’

  Raymond shook his head.

  ‘She won’t say. She called the doctor this morning. The duty GP turned up and couldn’t certify cause of death as he wasn’t the father’s regular doctor so he rang the police and the duty undertaker. The undertakers got the body to the DRI morgue where the case has been referred to the coroner. Then the daughter confessed to killing him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How what?’

  ‘How did she kill him? Why was the body removed? Surely the scene should have been sealed off and the pathologist called?’

  Raymond shook his head. ‘It wasn’t necessarily a suspicious death. Poor bloke had been ill with liver cancer for a few months. His daughter said he’d died in the night, the doctor checked the medical records and confirmed the illness. The father had been seen by a GP in the last few days so the doctor allowed the body to be removed. Anyway, the daughter confessed once the body was en route to the DRI. I’d assume a PM will be organised in light of what the daughter has said.’

  ‘So why confess?’ Kate asked.

  ‘My guess is that she was worried that there might be a PM and she wanted to pre-empt it in case something obvious showed up. Overdose possibly, or suffocation.’

  ‘Has she asked for a solicitor?’

  ‘Nope. The only person she’s asked for is you.’ He stared at her accusingly as though he thought she was keeping something from him.

  It made no sense. Why would somebody she’d never met turn themselves in for murder and refuse to speak to anybody else?

  Only one way to find out.

  A uniformed officer was standing outside Interview Three as Kate approached carrying two cups of coffee and a packet of chocolate digestives which she’d managed to stuff under one arm for safe keeping. A thin file containing the arresting officer’s report was under her other arm. The PC smiled at her awkward approach and opened the door to allow her to pass before following her inside.

  Caroline Lambert was sitting at the table, both feet on the floor and both hands resting on the grubby table-top. Her eyes flicked up as Kate sat down opposite her but her face showed no emotion. Kate studied her, assessing her age, height and general demeanour more from habit than necessity. Caroline Lambert looked like she was in her late thirties or early forties, her blonde hair showed no sign of grey and her make-up was subtly but expertly applied – obviously a woman who cared about her appearance. The police-issue grey tracksuit contrasted with her perfectly shaped and polished nails and her straight-backed posture. Her pale blue eyes flicked from Kate’s face to the coffee and back again but she still didn’t speak.

  ‘Thought you might like a drink,’ Kate said, pushing one of the cups across the table. ‘I brought milk and sugar.’ She dug in her pockets for the sugar sachets and milk containers and placed the biscuits next to her cup. Still no response. Kate sugared her coffee and watched as Caroline slipped the lid off her own and took a sip. She grimaced slightly and put it back on the table.

  ‘It’s not really what the canteen’s known for,’ Kate joked. ‘The Michelin star’s more for the food than the beverages.’

  A faint smile.

  ‘Caroline, you do understand what’s happening here?’ Kate said, trying to work out if the woman opposite was fully aware of her surroundings. She looked like she could be in shock; her lack of emotion was unsettling and she didn’t seem aware of her situation at all.

  ‘I’m under arrest for the murder of my father,’ Caroline said. ‘I confessed and I’m willing to make a statement.’

  Her accent was northern, her vowels blunt instruments bludgeoning her words but, beyond that, Kate couldn’t really tell where she was from.

  ‘Okay,’ Kate said. ‘Then I’ll need to record our conversation.’ She switched on the tape recorder, stated the time and date and the people present, and then opened the file that Raymond had given her.

  ‘Caroline, you’ve said that you’ll only talk to me? Do we know each other?’ Kate had met a number of people who claimed to have been at school with her, or who knew her as a child, since her return to South Yorkshire, and there were quite a few that she couldn’t remember at all. She usually just nodded politely and noncommittally but this woman was too young to have been in any of her classes at Thorpe Comp. Maybe a friend of her sister, Karen?

  ‘Not exactly,’ Caroline said. ‘I grew up on the Crosslands Estate, round the corner from where you used to live. My dad still lives… lived… there. I vaguely remember your family. You have a sister, don’t you? And your dad worked at the pit.’

  Kate shifted in her seat, uncomfortable with the way the conversation was turning to her past.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Caroline said, as if she could sense her discomfort. ‘I read about you in the South Yorkshire Times after the case with the children. Returning hero catches child killer, something like that. I probably got the details from there, but I do remember a few things about you. My best friend from school lived next door to you for a while. Susan Gough? I used to play in her garden sometimes and she was a bit in awe of the ‘big girls’ next door. I just wanted to talk to somebody who I had a connection with. It made sense when I asked for you but I’m not sure it does now. I apologise if I’ve caused you any inconvenience.’

  Her tone and vocabulary were as formal as a Victorian school teacher, making Kate wonder again if she had realised the seriousness of her situation.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember her,’ Kate said. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened this morning? Do you want a solicitor present?’

  Caroline smiled sadly. ‘I’m not sure that I need one. I just want to make an official statement.’

  Kate looked down her notes. ‘You said this morning that you’d killed your father. Is that true?’

  Caroline lifted her head and met Kate’s eyes, her expression one of defiance. Kate had been wrong; this woman knew exactly why she was here. She took a deep breath, preparing for her confession but the words, when they came, were
almost disappointingly banal. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘You called for the doctor, allowed your father’s body to be taken away and then confessed to the attending police officer.’

  Caroline glanced at the tape recorder and said, ‘Yes,’ clearly and loudly. Kate wondered if she’d watched a lot of police dramas – her behaviour suddenly appeared to be almost scripted.

  ‘How did you kill your father?’

  Caroline sighed, her eyes flicking backwards and forwards as though she was working out where to start. This obviously wasn’t part of a script; she looked genuinely confused and conflicted.

  ‘My father was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer a couple of months ago. It was aggressive and he was in a lot of pain. It wasn’t treatable so the hospital sent him home to die in familiar surroundings. I’ve been looking after him, feeding him, keeping him clean, and administering his medication. Yesterday he couldn’t get out of bed, the pain was too bad. He… he soiled himself and then lay in it for hours because he couldn’t bear to tell me. I managed to get him cleaned up last night but it was torture for him. He asked me to sit with him for a while afterwards and we had a long talk. He told me that he didn’t want to go on. That he knew he wasn’t going to recover. He was in pain and he wanted it to end. He’d been struggling to take his pain medication, the tablets, so the hospital prescribed Oramorph liquid. We had two bottles in the house, to last two weeks. I kept it in a downstairs cupboard.’

  Her sentences were short, clipped, stilted as she broke the events down into smaller portions, possibly so that she didn’t have to confess everything in one go. She picked up her coffee with a trembling hand and took a sip.

  ‘He… he also had a couple of bottles of Scotch. He’d always liked a drink and whisky was his favourite. He’d not been able to drink since his diagnosis. He asked for a glass of whisky and his morphine. I knew it would probably kill him. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I went downstairs and opened the cupboard.’

  Another sip of coffee.

  ‘I didn’t think I could do it, though. I thought about mixing the whisky with the morphine and giving him the glass but I just couldn’t. I paced around for a bit and then I heard a shout from upstairs. I ran up and he’d wet himself and was crying; I don’t know if it was the pain or the humiliation. That was when I decided. I cleaned him up again, got him into some dry pyjamas and went back downstairs. I took him a glass, the whisky and the Oramorph and left them on his bedside table. I knew, if he was determined enough, that he could mix it himself. Then I left him.’ Her breath hitched as she tried to stifle a sob of anguish.

  ‘What did you do?’ Kate asked. ‘Did you leave the house?’

  ‘Yes. I went for a drive. I didn’t want to be there if… when he did it.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably sometime around eight. I just drove. I couldn’t tell you where I went.’

  ‘Just in Thorpe?’

  ‘No. I remember driving past the crematorium in Doncaster. It registered with me because I suddenly realised that I had a funeral to plan.’

  Caroline took a shuddering breath that turned into a sob. ‘I went back home and got straight into bed. I set my alarm for six, earlier than usual and slept like a baby. I don’t know if it was the relief or sheer exhaustion.’

  ‘You didn’t check on your father when you got home?’ Kate asked.

  ‘No. I think a part of me didn’t want to know. I went into his room this morning and he was dead. He looked peaceful. I sat with him for a few minutes then called the ambulance. I wasn’t sure what to do so I thought an ambulance would be the best idea. A police officer turned up as well and then a doctor.’

  Kate looked down at the statement from the PCSO who had attended the scene. It corroborated what Caroline was saying.

  ‘And you handed yourself in?’

  ‘There wasn’t much point in doing anything else. I left him alone with the means to take his own life. He couldn’t have managed the stairs to get the drink and the drug himself. It was my fault. I killed him. It’ll all come out at an inquest. If there’s a post mortem it will confirm the drugs and drink in his system and my fingerprints will be on the glass.’

  She sat back and placed her palms flat on the table in front of her, suggesting that she thought the conversation was over.

  ‘Why did you wait until the body was on the way to the hospital before you confessed?’ Kate asked. It didn’t quite make sense. A police officer had attended the scene. Why not confess then? Why confess at all?

  Caroline studied Kate for a few seconds as though weighing up exactly how to construct an answer. She didn’t seem to have expected this question. ‘I didn’t want to turn his house into a crime scene. It was his home.’

  ‘But, surely you know that the police will have to investigate your claim? They’ll already have access to the house and they’ll check that any evidence corroborates your story.'

  Caroline looked startled, her eyes widened and her nostrils flared. ‘They’ll be in the house? Now?’

  Kate nodded. She wasn’t sure whether this was the case but she knew that the house would have been cordoned off until a forensic examination had been completed.

  ‘But why?’ Caroline asked. ‘I’ve told you what happened.’

  ‘As I said, they need to make sure that the forensic evidence backs up your story. You could be covering for somebody else, you could have killed your father in a different way, or you could simply be lying about the whole thing.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ Caroline asked, frowning. ‘Who wants to be charged with murder? I only handed myself in because if anybody decided that a post mortem was necessary it would look bad if I’d not spoken out. It would have been pretty obvious that he couldn’t have got downstairs by himself which would have implicated me straight away.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Kate said. ‘People do strange things to get our attention.’

  ‘At least he’s not there. That’s what I wanted. I needed him to be out of the way before I told anybody what had happened. I know it sounds a bit daft but I didn’t want him to see me get arrested.’

  ‘It’s not daft,’ Kate said kindly. She could see that the self-contained woman that had been sitting in front of her at the start of the interview was beginning to unravel. The story made sense and Kate wasn’t getting the feeling that Caroline was hiding something despite her slightly odd demeanour. It felt like a good time to give them both a break. She stated the time for the recording, terminated the interview and went to find Raymond who, she suspected, had probably watched at least part of the conversation.

  3

  Hollis and Cooper were back from the canal when Kate finally managed to extricate herself from Raymond’s office. Her instinct had been right; he had watched part of the interview and he’d been baffled by Caroline Lambert’s poise and her matter-of-fact statement. He’d even suggested that her sob, part way through, had been for effect, trying to appear more upset than she really was but Kate didn’t share his cynicism. He wanted to let Lambert stew in the interview room for a while and advised Kate to take somebody with her when she went back.

  ‘Any news on your unidentified body?’ she asked Cooper, who blushed at the direct question.

  ‘She’s not my…’

  ‘I know,’ Kate said. ‘Did anything else turn up after I’d left?’

  ‘Divers found her other boot,’ Hollis offered, pulling up a chair and sitting down in front of his computer. She could tell that he didn’t think it was significant. ‘It was at the bottom of the lock. They pulled out a few other bits of stuff that got bagged and tagged. We’ll know more when Kailisa’s finished with her. Still no ID, though. What about your mystery woman?’ He swiped his ID card and his long fingers flew across the keyboard as he logged on.

  Kate gave a detailed account of Caroline Lambert’s story, including Raymond’s thoughts about her composure and lack of emotion. She wasn’t convinced that the w
oman was as cold as the DCI was suggesting.

  ‘Could be shock,’ Hollis suggested, supporting Kate’s own theory.

  ‘Could just be a hard-faced bitch,’ said a voice from behind one of the computer monitors. O’Connor raised his head, thick beard barely disguising his grin. ‘Bet the dad’s rich and she’s done it for the inheritance.’

  ‘Hardly an original thought, O’Connor,’ Kate fired back at the DS. ‘But why not wait? He was dying anyway.’

  ‘Tons of debt? Loan sharks threatening her? There’s a lot of people owe a lot of money to some really dodgy characters.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ she said, dismissing O’Connor. He could always see a link to South Yorkshire’s seedy underbelly of illegal loans, deals and trafficking even in a case like this. He was good at ingratiating himself with people lower down the pecking order in gangs and using them to get dirt on the people at the top. Raymond thought the sun shone out of O’Connor, and his collar of the leader of an illegal smuggling and distribution network the previous summer had added to his kudos. Kate wasn’t convinced, though. She thought his methods and his contacts were bordering on unprofessional and she didn’t especially enjoy working with him.

  ‘A poxy ex-council house doesn’t seem worth killing somebody for,’ Hollis said. ‘It probably wouldn’t sell for much more than about eighty grand.’

  ‘Let’s go and have a look,’ Kate said. ‘Forensics should still be there. I wouldn’t mind having a look round to see if Caroline Lambert’s story adds up.’

  Kate hadn’t visited the Crosslands Estate since the summer. Now, in the grip of an icy winter her memories were a series of overlapping images. Events of the previous year bruised her mind with their immediacy as she scanned the old quarry site where she’d been called to view the body of a seven-year-old girl, and Kate shivered involuntarily as she caught sight of the chimney of the school’s old boiler house, stark on the skyline like a thumb raised in confirmation of her survival.