Хилари Боннер - Dreams of Fear

‘Do you still not know who these people are?’

‘Not really, although I’m beginning to guess they are some sort of secret service, or maybe an undercover police unit. And I just knew Gerry was holding back on me about all sorts of things. Jane’s death really frightened me. I arranged to meet Gerry yesterday afternoon, on the beach at low tide, and I was much tougher with him. I felt, probably wrongly, that I had nothing to lose. I told him if he didn’t come clean with me I would destroy him. God knows how I would have done any such thing. But he seemed to be in as bad a state as I was. Worse if anything.

‘It was then that he told me I’d only seen the edited version of the night Felix hit Jane. He showed me the full footage. The camera was one of those activated by movement, of course. The stuff I’d already seen ended with Jane lying down in the bed next to Felix, who already seemed to be sleeping. But there was more. Later, Jane woke Felix up and told him that she really had to talk to him. She’d remembered something terrible from the past, from her childhood. She mentioned a psychiatrist and regression therapy, which had brought it to the front of her mind, but she hadn’t been quite able to grasp it. She said she’d remained in a kind of denial until that night when she had frightened Joanna so much, and it had all come flooding back... ’

Sam stopped abruptly.

‘Please go on,’ Vogel prompted.

Sam looked as if he was about to continue, then he shook his head.

‘No, Mr Vogel,’ he said. ‘I just can’t. You’re going to have to ask Felix. I’ve already intruded unforgivably on the lives of my son and his poor wife, you said so yourself, and with terrible consequences.’

‘Look Sam, you’ve been guilty at least once before of withholding evidence during the course of this investigation. Please don’t make the same mistake again.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam. ‘It’s just too much, you see. Felix must decide whether to tell you.’

Vogel raised his voice very slightly.

‘You are treading very dangerous ground, Sam,’ he said. ‘You should be aware that I could charge you with perverting the course of justice. And Felix too, if he also decides to hold out on us.’

Sam shrugged.

‘You must do whatever you have to, Mr Vogel,’ he said.

He spoke quietly, which somehow made him sound all the more obdurate. Vogel considered he was going to get no further with Sam Ferguson on that particular line of questioning. Not for the moment, anyway.

‘All right, Sam,’ he said. ‘Let’s move on, for the moment. Are we to presume that the people who employed Gerry to spy on Jane knew whatever it was that she had done, and had her watched all those years because of it?’

‘Yes, Mr Vogel,’ he said. ‘That’s what I came to believe, anyway. Although I still don’t understand it. Indeed, they may well have been protecting her from afar, until they learned what she had remembered. Which, they wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t allowed Gerry to plant his damned surveillance camera. Collaborated with him, in fact... ’

Sam leaned forward slightly in his seat and lowered his face in his hands. He continued to speak, mumbling slightly through his fingers.

‘I asked Gerry again yesterday, who and why. He said he had never known why, not really, and I had to trust him, it was better, far better, if I didn’t know who.’

Sam looked up.

‘He was right about that, wasn’t he?’ he said. ‘They nearly killed me back there.’

‘Somebody tried, that’s for sure,’ agreed Vogel.

Sam might be a big burly man, fit for his years, but he was clearly deeply shaken. His face was ashen, and his hands were still trembling. Vogel thought it was time to get him medical attention, but he had one last question. The most important of all.

‘Sam, did Gerry have camera footage of Jane’s murder?’ asked the DCI.

‘No,’ said Sam. ‘Or at least, that’s what he told me. He said the surveillance camera had stopped working. It was the first thing he checked after he and Anne discovered Jane’s body. In fact, he said he spent most of the rest of that night fiddling with his phone, checking and double-checking, but the last forage he had was from earlier in the evening when Felix had gone up to his bedroom to change into his dinner suit. Gerry didn’t know whether something had gone wrong with it, maybe the battery had drained, or if someone had deliberately dismantled it before killing Jane.’

‘So that someone would have to have known it was there in the first place, and you don’t think Felix had any idea he was being filmed, do you, Sam?’

‘I’m sure he didn’t,’ replied Sam firmly.

‘One last thing,’ said the DCI. ‘I know you didn’t harm Gerry, you thought he’d asked you to meet him here, but where were you this morning?’

Sam laughed briefly and without humour.

‘I drove to Exeter to try to get a meeting with the chief constable,’ he said. ‘I thought that if anyone knew what was really going on, it would be him. And I thought he might help me. We used to play rugby together. But he clearly didn’t want to see me. I waited for hours before giving up.’

‘Why didn’t you tell your wife that?’

‘Look, it was before Felix was arrested. Amelia still believed Jane had taken her own life, and thought I did too. She would just have worried. When I arrived home and walked in on the arrest, I wasn’t going to come out with it in front of all of you. Then later, well, I’d failed, hadn’t I? So there didn’t seem much point. To tell the truth, I haven’t really known what the hell I’ve been doing since Jane died.’

‘All right, Sam, that’s enough for now,’ said Vogel. ‘But you do realize I will have to talk to you again, don’t you? Particularly if Felix fails to give us the information we need. Next time, it will be a formal interview at the police station, and if you refuse to offer your full cooperation you will be charged accordingly.’

Sam nodded very slightly. He looked as if he was past caring.

An ambulance had arrived. Two paramedics were standing by it. Vogel escorted Sam over to them, impatient now to get to Barnstaple police station. There were two men detained there who he was, by the minute, becoming more and more eager to interview.

On the way to Barnstaple Vogel spoke to DI Peters back at the incident room to inform her of all that had occurred. He asked her to organize a CSI team to search Granger’s flat, which didn’t require a search warrant as the man had been formally arrested on suspicion of a capital offence.

‘The address should be in the system,’ he said. ‘On that list of members of the NDYC.’

He also asked Peters to dispatch DC Perkins to Estuary Vista Close to re-interview Anne Barham.

‘I wonder what she really knows about her husband’s past, Saslow,’ Vogel mused. ‘A special branch of the civil service, eh? Looks like he might have been some sort of spook. If he was, it’s hard to believe his wife didn’t have any idea. He must have been darned good at his job.’

‘He didn’t look like a spook, seemed like a bit of a nerd to me, boss,’ said Saslow.

‘What would you expect?’ asked Vogel. ‘James Bond? Think boffin instead of nerd. GCHQ is one of our major secret intelligence services, and it’s staffed almost entirely by high-tech whizz kids, mathematicians, linguists, and the like. All top level.’

‘OK, but do we really believe the British intelligence service goes around murdering people? That’s pretty James Bond, isn’t it?’

‘They call it lethal force, I understand, Saslow. And I certainly don’t believe it’s unique to the Russian secret services. I wonder if you remember the death of Gareth Williams, he was a mathematician employed by GCHQ and seconded to MI6?’