Nick Oldham - Hidden Witness

In the mouth of the alley, the two boys stood mesmerized by the incident. They could see the old man lying on the road, broken, but moving, twitching. They were overwhelmed by the violence of the impact that had taken the breath out of their bodies. They were not prepared for what happened next.

The Volvo braked sharply ten metres ahead of the man. The engine revved. Then suddenly it reversed at speed, swerving wildly, engine screaming.

Raising his head slightly, the old man saw what was coming. The rear bumper of the car struck him and the back wheels crushed him, the car rising as though it was going over a speed hump. And it kept going, the front wheels doing the same, making the man writhe obscenely.

Still it wasn’t finished. The engine revved again, the car lurched forwards and mounted him again, front wheels, then back.

He must have been dead by now, his brittle bones and internal organs crushed. The car stopped and for one terrible moment they were certain it was going to reverse over him again.

The older one stepped forward, but the younger one held him back, something telling him it wasn’t over.

Why had the car stopped?

If this was a hit-and-run, the driver having made certain there was no living witness to his crime, why hadn’t he gone, left the scene? The old man was dead, why hesitate?

The younger boy ducked instinctively, stepping back into the darkness as the questions barraging through his brain were answered.

A man got out of the passenger door of the Volvo — the first realization to the boy that there were two people in the car.

It was a man, casually dressed, zip-up top, jeans, trainers, dark-haired, thirties, maybe. He walked back to where the old man lay in the road, unmoving, and bent to inspect him. Then the boys saw what he had in his hands, the fact registering with them at exactly the same instant.

A handgun of some sort. Neither could have said whether it was a revolver or pistol, but both saw the bulbous silencer fitted on to the barrel.

The gun was held at the man’s side and as he bent over, it angled at the old man’s head and the trigger was pulled twice. The old man’s head jerked as the bullets entered it.

The older boy, Rory, stepped into the light. ‘Hey!’ he called.

The man bending over the body turned his head and looked in his direction. There was a flash, lighting up his face.

He rose slowly, confidently and the gun came up.

The younger boy grabbed Rory’s arm and dragged him back into the alley, screaming ‘Run, run.’

They turned and sprinted away in the direction they’d come from, keeping low in the shadows, both expecting to feel the wham of a bullet in the back of the head.

‘ How many times do I have to tell you? I didn’t kill her.’

The prisoner smashed his fist on to the interview room table and glowered angrily at Detective Superintendent Henry Christie, his face now a blotchy red, neck sinews tight as wire. There had been a full day of denials and an increasingly tense and confrontational atmosphere as Henry had relentlessly twisted the screw, turning an initially placid suspect into one who seethed and showed his true colours. A man unable to contain rage.

Henry was now feeling jaded by the process, but still wanted to push on, knowing the momentum of an interview was invaluable. However, the man’s solicitor had started bleating about periods of adequate rest, as per the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, and Henry knew there had to be a break in order to comply with the law.

He leaned on the table and fixed eye-to-eye contact with the prisoner.

‘Mr Twist… Dennis,’ he began, keeping his voice level and unemotional, a tool that had managed to wind-up the suspect all day long. ‘Time’s getting on and we’re reaching a point where we have to conclude the conversation for the day. But before we pack up and you go back to your cell for a lovely sleep, there’s a few things I’d like to say.’ Henry paused, ensuring he’d got Twist’s attention. ‘You are a dangerous and violent man. You cannot control your temper. You act on impulse and gut feeling, and a red mist comes down over your eyes when you get angry — and then you attack. Which is what happened in the case of your girlfriend, isn’t it?’ Henry stopped again. ‘She wanted to end the relationship with you because of your increasing levels of violence towards her — and you suspected, without a shred of evidence, that she was seeing another man. Despite her denials, you strangled her with a length of clothesline, then disposed of her body and tried to destroy her remains by setting them on fire.

‘You then showed yourself to be a man who lies by pretending that she left you, and you continued to use her mobile phone to text her friends after you’d killed her, didn’t you? You tried to make them believe she was still alive.’ Henry gave a thin smile. ‘Maybe you should’ve got rid of the phone? Awful things mobiles, aren’t they?’

Twist’s face was a mask of anger. His teeth ground audibly, nostrils flared wide. His breathing was laboured and his fists bunched tightly in front of him. Henry kept up the eye contact, seeing the slight contraction of Twist’s pupils as he listened to this summary. ‘You murdered Helen Race, then you disposed of her body like you were throwing out trash. Then you covered it up by lying… lying… lying…’

Twist gave an almost imperceptible, but nonchalant shrug.

‘Thing is, though, Dennis, you were absolutely right about her. She was seeing someone else.’

The blood drained from his face.

‘You only suspected it,’ Henry whispered, ‘but our investigations have uncovered that she was seeing somebody else.’

Twist’s chest drew in air. ‘Bitch,’ he hissed. ‘Who?’

Henry gave his almost imperceptible shrug. ‘Not at liberty to reveal that.’

‘You don’t have to. I know.’

‘And that’s why you killed her, isn’t it? She got what she deserved, didn’t she?’ Henry was tightening things again. ‘I can see how you would feel. Cheated on, treated bad, mocked, laughed at behind your back. Despised. You put two and two together. Didn’t have to be a rocket scientist, did you?’

Sometimes it happens, Henry thought, sometimes it don’t. He waited for the reaction.

Twist sat back, his mouth contorting. He averted his eyes, which seemed to film over.

‘I hit her hard, first. With a hammer I got from B and Q. That felt good. The sound of it hitting her skull. The feel. I felt it sink into her skull. She was still alive when she hit the floor, right next to the ironing board. Handy, huh? She’d been ironing, see? So I used the flex, wrapped it round her throat.’ Henry saw Twist’s fists bunch up as he relived the moment. ‘Couldn’t stop myself. Knew it was wrong, but couldn’t stop… yeah, red mist.’

Henry emerged from the interview room an hour later having got Twist to take him through everything in detail. It was a harrowing sixty minutes, but from the point of view of a detective investigating murder, very satisfying because the confession was all they had. Twist had covered his tracks well, with one or two bloopers maybe, and the case against him had been circumstantial and slightly rocky. Now Twist was screwed.

Henry and the local detective sergeant, who’d been ‘second jockey’ with him in the interview, walked into the custody office and booked the master copy of the interview tape into the secure system. Then they made their way through Blackpool nick to the CID office on the ground floor. They stood aside to allow a couple of uniformed officers to rush past them on some emergency call-out or other.

In the CID office, all but deserted at that time of night, Henry and the DS discussed the case which would need tying up by the local cops. Henry, a detective superintendent jointly in charge of Lancashire Constabulary’s Force Major Investigation Team, had other things to do. He had only become embroiled in interviewing the suspect following a fairly desperate request from the DS whose interviewing team had been stonewalled by Twist. Superintendents rarely got involved in tactical interviews, but Henry had not wanted to lose this one, a murder that was particularly gruesome and upsetting.