A Carriage of Misjustice Read online

  “The detective inspector who reports to her, Robertson. His appendix went haywire back end of last week, and he’s developed peritonitis on top of appendicitis. They’ve operated successfully, but he won’t return to work anytime soon, no matter how much he wants to be. This bloke was running the investigation, and there’s nobody local to take his place. Even his sergeant’s been working nonstop on an abuse case.”

  “Bloody mess is no exaggeration, then.”

  “Yep.” Robin scratched Campbell’s head distractedly. “Cowdrey says it’ll be great for my career, but he also understands it won’t be easy, hard on the heels of last weekend.”

  “I should have applied to the school for unpaid leave. We could have headed off to the back of beyond, in which case they couldn’t have got hold of us.” Adam put his arm around Robin’s shoulders and held him close. “It’ll work. We’ll make it work.”

  Robin nuzzled into Adam’s chest. “Yeah, I know. I really wish I didn’t have to, but Betteridge was a good friend to me, and I feel I owe her. And there’s some poor dead sod who deserves justice.”

  “Don’t apologise. Just catch the bloody killer quickly so you can get back here. This is not the sort of honeymoon I imagined having.” Adam chuckled, gave him a kiss, then had to pretend to give Campbell one too, as the dog was clearly feeling left out.

  “I could tell Cowdrey to stick it. Politely, of course, because I’m neither that brave nor that stupid. He told me to take an hour to think it over.” Robin glanced at his watch. “I’ve still time to decide.”

  “Hey, I was only kidding about the honeymoon. You go. It’s not like I’m some blushing bride and we only had our first night together once you’d put a ring on it. As far as I’m concerned, the honeymoon started ages ago and it’s never stopped.” Adam gave him a lingering kiss. “It would be worse if I’d fallen for a soldier.”

  “You soft bugger. I’ll get onto Cowdrey right now, and put him out of his misery. He’ll be grateful, as will Betteridge.”

  “Anything I can do to help, let me know. When does he want you to travel?”

  “Tomorrow, preferably.” Robin grimaced. “I’m glad Sandra got all the washing and ironing up-to-date. I need to get rummaging in the airing cupboard and get a suitcase packed. There are other phone calls I should make too.”

  “Make one to your mum and another to Pru. Subcontract all other communication to them.” Mrs. Bright and Robin’s favourite sergeant would be able to handle any task set. In fact, the maternal information network would ensure the news would be halfway across the county within thirty minutes of Mrs. Bright being told. Adam wondered if she stood on her roof using semaphore flags or an Aldis lamp, depending on the time of day.

  “The first would work, but Pru’s likely to be too busy. Cowdrey said he’d like her to go with me. DS Betteridge wants me to have an officer I’m used to working with on my team, and it’ll be good experience for her.” Robin was clearly warming to the positive aspects of this assignment. “I’m sure that if I give young Ben a call instead, he can pass on the news to the team. He always hints he wants extra responsibility.”

  “Will you still be calling him young Ben in twenty years' time, when he’s in his forties and losing his hair?” Adam snorted. “Maybe then he’ll regard you like you regard Betteridge.”

  “If he does, I’ll be pleased.” Robin returned the kiss, grabbed his phone, and went to call Cowdrey.

  The casserole wouldn’t be ready for a while, so Adam nipped upstairs to get Robin’s clothes out of the airing cupboard; he laid them out on the bed, trying to be helpful and also gathering his thoughts.

  It had to be a good opportunity for both Robin and Pru in terms of career development. Showing their willingness to help out even if it meant personal inconvenience, the chance of working with a new team and a new area, and maybe learning things they could bring back and apply in Abbotston. Adam felt a swell of pride at the confidence Robin’s old boss clearly felt in her protégé, whatever other considerations might have come into play. Adam wasn’t going to get sidetracked into thinking about whether this might herald a move to Hartwood itself, with Betteridge taking Robin back under her wing in a police variation on the January football transfer window. Robin would certainly enjoy working with her again. He’d never expressed anything but praise for her and the way she’d fought her corner firmly but politely at so many turns.

  Adam would have loved to have been a fly on the wall the day when she’d charmingly pulled up a young sergeant who’d referred to her having had an attack of feminine intuition with the words, “If a bloke made a leap of reasoning like that, you’d call it a hunch, so that’s what we’ll call it in my case, eh?”

  Heavy pawsteps on the stairs, accompanied by snuffling, heralded the arrival of Campbell, who wasn’t usually allowed upstairs except on special occasions, of which this had to be one.

  “Come to make sure I’m laying out everything your other dad needs? He doesn’t want that, thank you.” Adam wrested a small stuffed toy—albeit not horribly slobbery—out of the Newfoundland’s jaws. “I’ll get him to FaceTime you every day so you’ll know he’s safe.”

  What would his colleagues say if they saw him having an earnest conversation with a dog? The children wouldn’t bat an eyelid, naturally. They’d understand such things were important.

  “We’ll both miss him, only don’t let on too much, eh? I don’t want him giving up the chance simply to stop us being upset.”

  Campbell glanced up, big brown eyes full of what might be interpreted as understanding, then nuzzled his nose into Adam’s hand. It was going to be just the two of them again for the next few weeks, and they’d need to take care of each other. Although there was a plus side to the situation: the murder having taken place so far away, the investigation of it really couldn’t draw him or Campbell in this time. Could it?

  Adam stretched over to touch the wooden bedside table, aware they’d tempted fate already that afternoon.

  Robin didn’t set off first thing the next day, not least because the traffic was always a nightmare on Monday morning. Reports on the morning travel news of an accident blocking the M40 and causing huge delays in the area left him feeling smug at making the right choice. He went into Abbotston station, where he could ensure a proper handover of active cases—Robin suspected Cowdrey was quite looking forward to rolling up his sleeves and being operational for a while.

  Pru and he also got their heads down for half an hour to familiarise themselves with what had happened so far in the investigation. As expected with anything organised by Betteridge, the initial enquiries had been methodical, painstaking, and had left no obvious stones unturned. Cowdrey having passed on an updated mobile number for her, Robin had sent a brief message to his old boss saying that he was delighted to be working for her again and received an answer along the same lines, with the intriguing addition, Something doesn’t add up in this case, and I can’t spot what it is. Fresh eyes welcomed.

  “It has to be out of the ordinary for Betteridge not to have put her finger on it,” Robin said, after sharing the message with Pru. “Sharp as a razor, that woman.”

  “It does seem an odd case all round on the face of it, sir.”

  That was an understatement, given what they’d learned reading the case notes.

  “Okay, Pru. Talk me through this like I know nothing.”

  “Last Wednesday evening bar one. Hartwood rugby team holding their regular practice session at the ground they share with the local athletics club. One of the players, Greg, gets badly hurt in a tackle, and the ambulance is called. Dave, the bloke he tackled, and his mate Andy both go into the changing room to clean up so they can head off to hospital, where they’ll keep the injured man company until his girlfriend, Dawn, can get there.”

  “Dawn’s the one who’s providing an alibi, right?”

  “Hey, you’re getting ahead, sir.”

  “Sorry. I’m finding it complicated, trying to take it all in at once,
rather than organically.” He’d not appreciated before how important the normal slow accruing of information was. “And don’t say it’s wedding brain.”

  “Never crossed my mind.” Pru grinned. “Right. Dave and Andy go into the changing room, then Dave goes into the loos on his own. He notices a pair of feet sticking out from one of the cubicles, nudges the door open and finds a man lying in there, stone dead because somebody’s walloped his skull. It turns out that the victim, Nick Osment, is the husband of the woman Dawn’s currently having a girls’ wine-and-chat evening with. As you say, she’s giving the alibi.”

  “If we believe her.”

  Pru wagged a finger at her laptop screen. “It says here there’s only one obvious way into the changing rooms—straight off the pitch—because the other door, connecting to the clubhouse, has been routinely kept locked and bolted on the other side unless the bar staff are in. Because of a spate of thefts a year back.”

  “People would have had keys to those doors, though. Maybe a set of master keys to the whole site.” Robin recalled the sports club where his dad had played football in the winter and cricket in the summer. A bloke they called Codger—Robin had no idea what his real name was—had a great big ring of keys that Mr. Bright had said included one for the Tower of London. Robin had believed that for months until his mother had put him straight. “We need to follow that through. Easy enough to enter from the bar, then bolt the door behind you when you’d used it to escape.”

  Pru nodded. “Unlikely the victim’s wife, Melanie, would have been in that position, but that’s me making assumptions. On the face of it, she has that unbreakable alibi for the time of death. Unless Dawn’s lying for her. Same goes for the people involved with the training session. They all account for each other at the time the murder is supposed to have occurred.”

  Robin shrugged. “I’ll have more of an idea about that when we’ve talked to some of the key people face-to-face. I trust Betteridge, but I have no idea how robust her junior officers are. You ask the wrong questions, you get incomplete statements.”

  “It’s going to need all our tact, sir. Witnesses won’t be happy to go through everything again, and they’ll be suspicious that the local force has somehow cocked up, which is why they’ve had to call us in.”

  Pru had a point. “Betteridge says she’s happy for us to be upfront about Robertson’s illness. But yes, we’ll tread carefully.” Robin glanced at his watch. “Traffic should have eased. Let’s hit the road.”

  The sooner they got on with things, the sooner he could get back to Adam.

  By the time they arrived in Hartwood, Pru and him sharing the driving, Robin had set up the first of their interviews. He’d wanted to nab the man who found the body, Dave Venter, but he wasn’t available until the next day, although his mate Andy—the one who’d accompanied him to the changing rooms—was happy to meet them as soon as they arrived. He worked around the corner from a Hilton hotel, so suggested they all meet in the bar there, which he reckoned served good coffee and had plenty of places where they could chat without being overheard.

  Robin and Pru drove straight there before going to the police station, both wanting to get something on this case firsthand. They’d soon, no doubt, be bombarded with the opinions of the constables already working on the murder. Robin had advised them he’d be there late afternoon for a meet-and-greet followed by a briefing. He toyed with offering to take them out for a beer, but held that in abeyance until he got a feeling for what they were like. He was there to do a job, not to be flavour of the month.

  Andy was waiting for them in the foyer, as they soon established after a bit of Are you waiting for us? type mime. He was ready to get down to business and seemed happy at an opportunity to rehash things. Maybe too happy, given the puppy-dog grin he kept flashing Robin. Somebody else who fancied him, like the choirmaster seemed to? Adam would be threatening to lock him up at this rate.

  “Thanks for meeting us,” Robin said, straight-faced. “Sorry to have to make you go through all this again, but we’re new to the case and I’d like to hear everything straight from you, not via someone else.”

  “I get that.” Andy nodded. “Word got around that the inspector who’d seen us had appendicitis. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. As for repeating stuff, I’m a customer service manager at an insurance company, so I know how information can get garbled if you don’t hear it direct.”

  They ordered coffee, then got settled in a quiet corner.

  “So, can we hear direct what happened at the training ground two Wednesdays ago?” Pru asked.

  Andy winced. “God, I’ll never forget that evening. Bad things happen to other people, right? I’d never have thought me and the guys would get caught up in something like this, but we got a shit-ton of crap dumped on us.”

  “You certainly did,” Pru said, soothingly. “You’ll still be in shock.”

  “We all are. Sorry, I sound like a whiny teenager, all sorry for myself, but it’s really got to us. And I feel guilty because it’s Greg I keep thinking about, rather than the bloke in the loos.” The sentiment sounded genuine.

  “Rugby’s a dangerous game. Anyone who’s played it appreciates the risks.” Shontayne Hape had suffered so many concussions he’d not been able to remember his PIN.

  “Yeah, we’ve had that drummed into us enough. You should hear Coach. ‘Not like the old days where we pretended not to be hurt and walked round in a daze half the time.’” It must have been an acceptable impression of a Welsh accent given that Pru didn’t appear to object. “Now we have proper protocols for head injuries.”

  Pru, being a valleys girl, was even more enthusiastic about rugby than Robin or Adam. “Coach misses the old days, does he?”

  “Yeah. He always says nobody can sidestep like they used to back then. But all joking aside, he doesn’t miss the injuries. Seen too many good blokes affected for the rest of their lives. Like Greg might be. Up to now we’ve had nothing worse than a few broken noses and cauliflower ears. Trouble is none of us believed that the big, bad injury was ever going to happen at Hartwood. Until it did.”

  Time to bring this back to the matter in hand before it became a rugby heart-to-heart. “Coach? Was he leading the training session?” Robin asked.

  “Yeah, he always does. Oh, and his name’s Derek Preese but nobody uses that.”

  “Ah. That name rings a bell from the statements. Right, imagine we know nothing about what went on at training. Talk us through it.” Much as Robin wanted to get through the rugby stuff and get onto the finding of the body, they needed to set the scene. The action on the pitch was all going on at the same time as the victim was being attacked, which made the matter of who was where, and doing what, vital.

  “Okay. It was a normal training session, almost.”

  “Almost? Want to clarify that?”

  “Well, such a bad injury wasn’t normal, was it? Before that we were all on the pitch, running through the usual moves and practice plays. Then Greg Holmes, who plays on the flank meaning he’s pretty nippy despite being muscular with it, got his angle wrong going into a tackle on Big Dave and caught the side of his neck on the bloke’s shoulder.” Andy paused for breath, having delivered all that at a lick. “The pair of them went down awkwardly, and Greg didn’t get up.”

  “Take your time,” Pru said. “We know it’s not easy.”

  Andy nodded. “Greg was out for the count, so our scrum half Joe—who’s first-aid trained—came running over, meaning to put him in the recovery position, but Coach said it was best to leave him alone. Somebody, Gareth I think it was, called an ambulance, while Joe kept an eye on Greg to make sure he was breathing okay.”

  Greg, Gareth, Big somebody or other. Robin was glad that Pru was keeping a record of all the names to compare with their notes. The arrival of a waiter with coffees a few seconds later was very welcome, letting Robin get his head round the characters and emotions involved that night.

  Once the waiter had gone again, A
ndy continued. “Eventually I took Dave off to the side of the pitch, because he was getting himself into a hell of a state. I kept telling him it had been an accident, and he kept saying that he hadn’t meant to dip his shoulder as he went into the collision. He was rambling, going on about how he wished it had been him who’d been injured, how he’d never forgive himself, and how Dawn was going to kill him.”

  Robin wasn’t unsympathetic. He could imagine what Dave had been thinking, wondering if things would have turned out okay if he’d taken the tackle at a different angle, or whether it might have made things worse. Wanting to go back in time and replay the moment, changing the outcome. “We’ve not been to the ground yet. Could you draw us a rough sketch of where everything is, and what part of the pitch the accident happened on?” He produced a notepad and pen.

  “Yeah, of course.” Andy set to, talking as he drew. “Typical multipurpose place. Athletics, rugby, training. There’s a stand along the home straight—there’s the rugby pitch touchline running alongside. The bar-cum-clubhouse takes up half the bottom of the stand and the changing rooms are at the back and side. You get to them through this tunnel, right by the twenty-two. Go down there, then turn right. There’s no external door to the changing rooms, but there’s a direct door though to the clubhouse.”

  “Is that the only door to the clubhouse?” Robin asked.

  “No, there’s three altogether. One out the back and another into the tunnel. You need them to cope with the postmatch rush.”

  Robin bent his head over the paper. “Can you see the bar from the pitch?”

  “Nope. The bar area windows are mainly at the side, with a row of small ones facing the pitch, but they only really let in a bit of light. The bar seating area is under the spectator seating, if that makes sense.”

  Which meant somebody could go in there and hang about, unnoticed.

  “Where did the accident happen?” Pru asked.