Separated at Death (The Lakeland Murders) Read online

  Mann beat Hall into work by half an hour, and since his shift didn’t start for over an hour he used the time to catch up on a bit of other work: in particular Ryan Wilson and that car full of drugs.

  Various emails had been sitting unread in his inbox since the previous day, not least because Ryan still had a few days to go before he had to answer bail. The first one that he opened didn’t surprise him much, because the techies confirmed that Ryan had indeed received instructions in the way that he’d said, and that the sender of the messages would prove ‘very hard, if not impossible, to trace.’

  Mann would have been surprised if Ryan had lied, and astonished if they’d been able to trace who his employer was. Because while Ryan may have been only a sporadic attender at school he was far from stupid, and he’d been in trouble often enough to understand how the system worked. A car full of drugs bought him a higher level of police resource than his usual level of offending did, so Ryan would have known that his story would be subject to a decent level of investigation. And the chance of him voluntarily giving the police any useful information, about anything or anyone, was as close to zero as made no difference.

  But the next email was surprising, and Mann was re-reading it when Andy Hall walked in and came over to say hello. Mann realised that he must have been frowning.

  ‘Morning Ian, what’s up?’

  ‘Morning Andy. Nothing really, just an odd email about Ryan Wilson and all the gear we got out of that car.’

  ‘Oh yes, what about it?’

  ‘You know I told you it had a street value of upwards of a hundred grand? Well I was wrong. A few hundred quid would be more like it.’

  ‘But I thought the doors were stuffed with it?’

  ‘They were, but its nearly all rubbish. Yes, there’s enough class A for a possession conviction, but it’s absolutely cut to buggery. Our friends in forensics say that it’s ‘not of merchantable quality’, the sarcastic bastards.’

  Hall smiled. ‘So where does that leave you?’

  ‘With one less thing to worry about I suppose. Ryan was looking at serious charges, but I doubt the CPS will be interested now. Ryan will probably get off with yet another caution.’

  ‘How many is that now?’

  ‘Who knows? Twenty probably. Seriously, I’ve lost count. But it is a bit strange though, isn’t it? Why would someone go to all that trouble to load a car up with all that crap, and do all that cloak and dagger communication stuff with Ryan? Let’s face it, Ryan’s usual speed is nicking computers, not using them.’

  Hall picked up the hand weight that Mann kept on his desk. It was surprisingly heavy, but having lifted it he tried to look as if he knew what to do with it, and tried a few front raises. Mann didn’t look all that impressed, so Hall put it back.

  ‘I wonder if it might have been some kind of test for Ryan’ suggested Hall, ‘to see if he’d go through with it? Or maybe it was one of his former pals setting him up. How come he got stopped again? Tip-off?’

  ‘Yes, it was, but it wasn’t from a known informant, just an anonymous call in, which is why traffic stopped him rather than the drugs boys. They didn’t reckon it at all as a tip-off apparently. Ryan’s name wasn’t mentioned, all we got was the make, year and that it would be on the M6 late that night. Funny enough the car Ryan was driving was fine otherwise; taxed, insured, MOT, the lot.’

  ‘Blimey, that must have been a first for our Ryan.’

  ‘Yes, the traffic boys said his face was a picture when they told him that the car was actually legal. But that was before they found the gear of course.’

  ‘So what’s next? Just cut him loose when he answers bail? Shame; it would have been nice to get that little bastard on something that would have brought him a bit of proper jail time finally. I assume he’s old enough?’

  ‘Yes, he’s twenty one now, believe it or not. But you can bet your life that when Ryan got the key to the door it actually belonged to someone else.’

  Hall laughed quietly and made for his office. That DNA result should be in any time now, and he was banking on it helping, if only with elimination. Hall knew the statistics as well as the next copper, though not perhaps quite as well as CS Robinson, so he knew that most murders are actually cleared up remarkably quickly. But Amy’s death was never going to be one of those, and Hall was now becoming seriously concerned about the lack of any eye-witness evidence.

  While he waited for his computer to boot up, always a lengthy procedure since it was now well past its planned replacement date, Hall took stock, not of the case, but of his own state of mind. Would he be able to concentrate? Should he grass himself up to Robinson and take a couple of days compassionate leave? That one was easy: absolutely no way. No matter how he felt he would never do that.

  And when he thought about his ability to concentrate, and to put in another really long shift, he decided that he would actually be fine. To his considerable surprise he actually felt better rested than he had done in days, and if this case was going to turn into a marathon then he’d need all the stamina he could muster. His focus felt fine too. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but the moment that he’d walked into the station Amy’s death became the only thing that he could think about, and he was sincerely grateful for that.

  It was almost nine before the email he’d been waiting for dropped into his inbox. But in Hall’s experience people who worked with the dead tended to keep office hours. The vaginal samples would take another little while to run matches against, but they had a perfect profile, based on a good sample. Amy’s fingernails had yielded a couple of inorganic fibre samples and a tiny amount of DNA. The profile wasn’t complete, but it definitely didn’t match the other sample. So it could be something or nothing.

  So Hall picked up his phone, and asked Jane Francis to bring her laptop in, and take him through what she’d found on Amy’s machine so far.

  ‘It’s a wonder that kids ever get any work done these days’ she said, when she’d set up on Hall’s meeting table and they were sitting side by side. ‘Amy had only had this computer for a few months and the hard drive was already clogged up with all sorts. But I’ve been able to go through her emails and I’m pretty sure we’ve found the lad who she’s been hanging about with, name of Ryan. Have a look at these emails.’

  Hall had a bit of trouble deciphering the abbreviations, but the meaning was clear enough. He felt slightly uncomfortable sitting next to Jane as he read through them.

  ‘We’ve got an actual address for the IP location’ she added, ‘and though the whole family are known to us there’s only one lad in the right age range living there. And, by happy coincidence, he’s a Ryan; Ryan Wilson.’

  ‘Ryan? Bloody hell, talk about opposites attracting. You probably haven’t had the dubious pleasure of nicking him yet, but he’s not exactly your Brando style anti-hero. Does Ian Mann know about this?’

  ‘No, I only got the address about half an hour ago, and I was just looking at what we had on the whole family. That took quite a long time.’

  ‘I’m sure it did.’ Hall got up, went to the door, and called Ian Mann. ‘You’re seriously not going to believe who Amy’s boyfriend was.’

  Hall was right, Mann didn’t believe him. ‘Jane’ he said, ‘is there any chance that the IP address thing is wrong? Maybe BT have got their wires crossed or something. Ryan’s an absolute little shitbag, honestly.’

  ‘No chance Sarge, it’s him all right. Look at these emails he sent Amy.’

  Mann read them. ‘The spelling’s bad enough to be Ryan’s I suppose’ he conceded. He looked up at Hall, who was standing at the far end of the table. ‘So the question is...’

  ‘..could Ryan be a killer? What do you think Ian? He’s always been a bad lad.’

  ‘Yes he has.’ Mann went quiet, and Hall knew better than to interrupt. Jane Francis wanted to say something, but as she went to speak Hall shook his head. He wanted to hear what Mann’s assessment was. ‘He does have a bit of form for violence,
and if I remember rightly he got expelled from primary school when he hit a woman teacher. I think he was ten. But since then it’s been the usual gang crap: just a lot of handbags, vandalism, thieving and drugs. The usual progression really, nothing out of the ordinary. Anti-social as they come, and the whole family must be a nightmare to live next door to, but I just don’t see Ryan as a killer. Sorry, but I don’t.’

  Hall sat down next to Jane, and opposite Mann. ‘I hear you Ian, but young Ryan Wilson has just got himself back on your to-do list for today. So why don’t you...”

  Hall tailed off, because he could see Robinson walking quickly towards his office. He looked pleased enough to polish his buttons. ‘Have you seen the DNA results? There’s a match. It’s Ryan Wilson. Looks like we might be on our way to a result now, Andy. I’ll let the Chief know we’ve got a serious development. That family’s been trouble for all the time I’ve been a copper, and it looks like young Ryan might have done something really, really stupid this time.’

  At Robinson’s insistence they went mob-handed to Ryan’s mum’s house, and to hell with the overtime. Mann thought that it was total overkill, and he was far from sure that Ryan was guilty of anything beyond punching above his weight in the girlfriend department. They already knew that Amy and Ryan had been having a relationship, and the DNA results simply confirmed that. But Robinson didn’t seem to see it that way at all.

  Mann and Hall waited in the car while a van full of cops, plus a couple of lads from the armed response team took up position at the back the house. Another team covered the back door and side alley. When they got the word that everyone was in place the two detectives walked to the front door. Mann was the only copper not wearing a kevlar vest.

  Mann gestured the two cops with the battering ram to move aside from the front door and he knocked loudly. The door didn’t open, and the two cops with the battering ram moved forward again, hoping to do a bit of door splintering. The council would have to fix it anyway. But Mann gestured again, and they fell back. He knocked once again, louder and longer this time.

  The swearing from inside was equally loud and long. It seemed that Ryan’s mum must have finally looked out of one of the upstairs windows. They heard Ryan’s name being shouted. Eventually he opened the door, looking shocked at the police presence outside the house, but Mann didn’t feel the need for any muscular antics. ‘I’m going to have to cuff you Ryan’ he said, and the young man held out his hands immediately. ‘I expect you know why we’re here’ said Mann, and for once Ryan decided not to come back with anything clever. He didn’t like the look of the dog at the end of the path, barely being held onto by a handler, but he guessed that was the whole idea.

  In the car Ryan tried to chat to Mann, but it was no good. They never said anything in the car when they had something serious on their minds, and Ryan was certain he knew exactly what that was. In a way he was surprised they hadn’t been round sooner but, he realised, the only possible reason for that was because Amy must have been ashamed of him, because otherwise her posh friends would have known who he was all the time they’d been going out together. And that thought pissed Ryan right off.

  When they reached the station Ryan noticed that the booking in procedure was just a bit different. The smiles and jokes were absent, and he noticed a senior looking cop, who he’d never seen before, standing off to one side in the custody area, just watching him.

  On the positive side he didn’t have to wait for hours in a holding cell. Ryan was pretty sure that he had been in all five over the years, and he was taken straight to the same interview room that he’d been in a couple of nights before.

  Ryan had five minutes with the duty solicitor, an older man who he hadn’t seen before, and who told Ryan what he knew, that the questions would be about the suspicious death of Amy Hamilton. He also checked that Ryan knew how to deal with questioning, and the implications of a ‘no comment’ reply. Ryan said ‘no comment’ and laughed at his own joke. The duty solicitor just looked doubtful.

  Ian Mann flicked on the tape recorder, and introduced Andy Hall, who Ryan thought he might have seen around the station before. But Ryan knew how this worked, and it was obvious that Mann was going to do the talking.

  ‘So Ryan, let’s start with a nice easy one. Did you know Amy Hamilton?’

  ‘Yeh, I knew Amy.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  Ryan knew how this would work, so he kept his answers short. They were all true too, which made it much easier than usual. But the way the cops worked was simple, and it never changed. All they were looking for were facts, things that could be checked, and things that could be compared with what other people said. It still took them fifteen minutes to get to the important questions.

  ‘So you and Amy had been having a sexual relationship for the last few weeks, maybe a couple of months?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And last Wednesday evening you met in the old wood store on the edge of Serpentine Woods?’

  ‘Yes. It was starting to get cold, and we’d talked about finding somewhere else soon. But we couldn’t use her place, or mine.’

  ‘And you met there on Wednesday night?’

  ‘Yes, at about 8 o’clock.’

  ‘And what then?’

  “Do you want me to draw you a diagram?’

  Mann let it go by.

  ‘So you had sex. What time did you leave?’

  ‘About half-past eight. I had to get to the train station in town to get my connection from Oxenholme to Carlisle.’

  ‘How did you get to the station?’

  ‘On my bike. I just just went down through the ginnels on Fellside, then past the birdcage and straight down to the station. I got a train to Oxenholme at about quarter to nine, maybe just after, and the train left Oxenholme for Carlisle at just after nine. There’ll be CCTV, you can check.’

  ‘We will check Ryan. So that’s the last you saw of Amy? And she was alive and well when you left her?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘And what was she going to do next? Did she say?’

  ‘Going to see her friend, I don’t remember her name. Some boring school work or something.’

  ‘And you knew that Amy was dead?’ Ryan nodded. ‘And you never thought to come forward with this information before?’

  The solicitor spoke for the first time. ‘This is the first time that you’ve asked my client about this matter, and he is co-operating fully, I think you’ll agree. Have you finished now Sergeant Mann?’

  ‘Not quite. Inspector Hall, is there anything you’d like to ask?’

  ‘Yes, there is. Ryan, when you were with Amy, did she get any calls or texts?’

  ‘Her phone was always going off.’

  ‘Yes, but what about on Wednesday evening, how about then?’

  ‘I expect so. I can’t remember.’

  ‘I want you to think hard Ryan. Let’s try phone calls. Did anyone call Amy while you were together?’

  ‘No. Wait a minute though. As I was leaving her phone did ring, and I waved to her and left. I would have missed my train if I’d waited.’

  ‘Did you hear what she said to the other person? Can you remember?’

  Ryan shook his head. The older copper looked disappointed.

  ‘You know what I think happened Ryan’ said Hall, after a while. ‘I think that Amy dumped you on Wednesday night, and you couldn’t take that. Maybe she said that you weren’t the type of lad that she could take home, something like that. That hurt you. But she was right, wasn’t she? Is that why you killed her Ryan?’

  ‘No. She was fine when I left her. I didn’t kill Amy. I’ve told you the God’s honest truth.’

  Ryan knew the form from here. He knew that he hadn’t touched the girl, and that everything he’d said had been true. So surely they won’t going to charge him? But as he sat in the holding cell he became quite a bit less sure. After all, he’d not been charged with plenty of things that he had done, so maybe the coppers
sometimes charged people with things they hadn’t done as well.

  Hall and Mann had left the interview room, and had joined Robinson in his office. You could have eaten your dinner off his meeting table, but you’d have worried about scratching it.

  ‘What was all that about the phone calls, Andy?’ asked Robinson.

  ‘We know that Amy’s phone had an incoming call at the time that Ryan said, so we know it wasn’t him that made it. And another call was made back a few minutes later from Amy’s phone, although we’ve no way of knowing for certain that she did make it herself. But we do know she was alive when it was made, so it’s very likely that Amy made that call.’ Hall paused, then continued thinking aloud. ‘Her phone is still missing, so we have to assume that the killer took it, and as I say the likelihood was that she did make that last call, after Ryan had gone, probably to the killer. If that’s the case then Ryan didn’t kill her, so long as the rest of his story checks out.”

  ‘What do you think Ian?’ asked Robinson, ‘you know the lad.’

  ‘He’s a practised liar of course, and he’s not stupid, so although his story does hang together it is absolutely possible that he’s lying. But realistically the only way he can have done it is if the time of death is a long way out. He’s bright enough to know that he’s covered by CCTV from the time he showed up at Kendal station, probably well before, and he said as much just now.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean that he didn’t do it though, does it? The time of death doesn’t have to be far out, and we know he was very close to the locus. But have we got enough to charge him now?’

  Hall tried not to look surprised. ‘No, I don’t think so. We can certainly hold him while we get SOCOs out to the wood shed, and start checking CCTV at the station and on the train. We’ll need to find his bike going down through town too. But what’s his motive? Not sexual surely, not robbery, and no signs on Amy’s body of a struggle. But of course the wood store might tell us a different story, and if it does then we’re back in business.’