A Murderous Mind Page 20

  She had been hoping, she realized, for something that would rescind Trinder’s accusations, but one look at Nathan’s face told her that she was out of luck.

  ‘On the face of it,’ Gregory told them when they had settled in the flat and Napoleon had been fussed, ‘he’s above any kind of suspicion. He’s a model in his professional conduct, a good husband and father, well thought of in his local community and active with a half dozen charity boards.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But …’ Gregory said. He consulted his notes.

  ‘Two daughters aged nineteen and seventeen. Married to Sheila Reece nee Colbrook, she’s an NHS manager, responsible for locating and organizing beds across the regional health authority. Youngest daughter, Hester is still at sixth form college and the older one, Rhea, is studying music, in the first year of her degree course. He doesn’t have so much as a speeding ticket. Neither does she for that matter. Clean record at work too. There have been a couple of minor complaints made about him in all the years of professional practice and both were dismissed.’

  ‘What were they?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘One was ten years ago, when he was still working for CAMHS, a parent complained that the referral he made for their daughter was not to the most appropriate practitioner. It seems he decided the girl was anorexic and referred accordingly; the parents were in denial about the diagnosis. They made a formal complaint.

  ‘The second was a little more serious. A complaint was made regarding unfair dismissal. A colleague complained that Reece had a personal dislike of him and had started a vendetta. It went to tribunal and no evidence was presented, the case was dismissed.’

  ‘And what happened to the complainant?’

  ‘His name was Doctor Theo Dalby and he died in a drowning accident six months after the tribunal. No evidence was presented because he didn’t turn up at the tribunal, apparently.’

  ‘Pressure applied?’ Alec suggested.

  ‘No way of knowing. For the most part no one has a bad word to say for him.’

  ‘Was the death suspicious?’

  ‘Apparently he’d been depressed for quite some time. He was found floating in the canal. But his regular route home was along the towpath. He’d been drinking in the local pub and his blood alcohol level was over the limit for driving and a little suspect for walking along a canal towpath on a freezing and icy night. It’s moot but the verdict was accidental.’

  ‘And he’s not appeared on the suspect list anywhere else?’

  ‘No, but he was definitely in the area when three of the murders were committed.’ Nathan said. ‘The night Keith Allen died, Reece was at a hotel ten miles away, attending a conference.’

  ‘Alibi?’

  ‘For what? He was never a suspect. No link was made.’

  ‘When Martia Richter died, he was certainly in the same city for the day before and two after. Guest lectures at the university and at a presentation of some kind at the Mechanics Institute. He seems to have stayed on for another day. His wife was with him on that occasion but—’

  ‘Too long ago to establish any kind of timeline,’ Alec said.

  ‘And what was the third?’ Naomi wanted to know.

  ‘He was in London the weekend Trey Baxter was killed and he may have come into contact with the friend whose flat the body was left in.’

  ‘Contact? How. Why wasn’t that noted?’

  ‘Because he was just one of god knows how many people in London for the weekend,’ Nathan said. ‘And one of the many people who had vague contact with the friend, Andrea Johnson. Her boyfriend attended one of the lectures Reece gave that week as part of a programme of career events run by the University of London. It’s incredibly tenuous.’

  ‘And we know this because?’

  ‘Because the boyfriend was, albeit very briefly, a suspect. He had to provide a timeline. Reece’s lecture was on that timeline.’

  ‘And how many people attended the lecture?’ Naomi asked. ‘Nathan’s right. It’s all circumstantial. Is this what Joe had? All Joe had? That and a “feeling”?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. Reece was still in the area when the murders happened.’

  ‘And the chances are any of us could be in an area when a murder happened. Murders happen; you travel around enough it’s entirely possible there could be coincidence of events. That you could happen to be in three separate cities when there happen to be violent deaths.’

  ‘In Gregory’s case, it would probably be more than coincidence,’ Nathan said. ‘And yes, of course it’s open to confirmation bias. We – and Joe Jackson – are just looking at the facts that fit a possible presumption as opposed to those that negate it. He could have been hundreds of miles away when the other deaths happened and been in dozens of places when murders didn’t happen. Coincidence sometimes is just two things happening to happen.’

  ‘But you don’t believe that,’ Alec stated.

  ‘I’m open to possibilities,’ Nathan said. ‘I think we have to take a hard look at our doctor, see what he gets up to.’

  ‘You mean you’ve already set up surveillance,’ Naomi demanded.

  ‘I’m here, so is Gregory.’

  ‘Which means nothing. Have you?’

  ‘It won’t hurt,’ Nathan said. ‘And there’s another reason for watching him. He seems to be taking an interest in you and more particularly, he seems to be taking an interest in Patrick.’

  ‘What?’

  Nathan related how on three separate occasions, Reece seemed to have sought their young friend out.

  ‘Could be coincidence again,’ Naomi said slowly. ‘The first time he could have just happened into that hotel. Then he might just happen to have been standing on the promenade. People do …’

  ‘Even you don’t sound convinced. The promenade is the opposite direction from home, from the university, from any of his usual routes. And then he was across the road from the flats when Patrick and Daniel Goldman helped to move their friend Sam into his new room. Patrick noticed him heading for the towpath when they came out. When Patrick spoke to him when he came out of his lecture he asked about you. Patrick mentioned seeing him in the hotel and at the promenade.’

  ‘He what?’ Alec demanded.

  ‘He asked about Naomi. Said he’d just made the connection that the woman on the beach with the guide dog was an ex-patient of his and an ex-colleague of Joe Jackson’s. He said he remembered you and wanted Patrick to say hello.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A couple of days ago. Patrick had no reason to suspect him of anything but he doesn’t like him and Patrick’s instincts are good, you know that.’

  Naomi was shaken. ‘Watch him,’ she said. ‘And make sure Patrick keeps out of Reece’s way.’

  ‘Suddenly he goes from good guy to suspect?’

  ‘Anyone goes from good guy to suspect if they even look like they’re threatening Patrick or Harry.’

  ‘So we watch and we see what happens,’ Nathan said.

  ‘And you two keep yourselves safe,’ Gregory instructed. ‘Lock the doors and let us know where you plan to be if you go out. So far, he knows nothing about us, we’re ahead of the game. Let’s keep it that way.’

  FORTY-FIVE

  It had taken Tess a while to get on to Reg Fincher’s notes and in the end she and Nat had split the load and settled down to sift. Fortunately either Reg or the solicitor had been pretty organized. Financial and accounting stuff had been separated out as had deeds to the bungalow, various bits and pieces of legal documents – including Reg Fincher’s will. He had no living relatives, it seemed and apart from a few small bequests to friends, he had ordered that everything he owned be sold and the proceeds divided between a couple of children’s charities.

  ‘That’s sad,’ Nat said when she read it out. ‘Do you think he ever married? Ever wanted to be?’

  Tess shrugged, something suddenly striking her about the crime scene at Fincher’s bungalow. ‘His walking stick was missing,’ she s
aid. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Walking stick?’

  ‘He walked with a limp. Apparently he was born with a deformed foot. It was a big, heavy thing. Hawthorn, I think, kind of knobbly.’

  Nat looked puzzled. ‘You think the killer might have taken it? You want me to call it through, see if it’s at the crime scene?’

  Tess nodded. ‘Do that. I might just have missed it.’

  While Nat was put on hold, Tess picked up the first in her pile of notes. It appeared to be a transcript of a lecture that Fincher had delivered. She scanned at first and then found herself smiling. She could hear Reg Fincher’s voice in her head as she read the notes. She had liked him, Tess realized. He would be an interesting man to have talked to.

  In the Middle Ages, Fincher wrote, people were allowed, even encouraged to buy Indulgences. These were like portable forgiveness vouchers, issued by the church and sold by priests and monks and if you bought enough of these Indulgences then you could go off and kill someone or commit rape or theft or what have you and you’d be forgiven, even without confession through the intervention of a priest because you’d already pre-paid for all that. They were especially favoured by the rich, as you can imagine. I often imagine them buying a whole book load of these things and tearing out the sheets when they’d used them up. You can imagine it, can’t you? ‘I’ve used up my coupon for murder, so I need to drop by the abbey and pick up a few more of those before I go off on the next crusade …’

  Sounds flippant put that way, doesn’t it, but Indulgences were a reality in Medieval life and they probably performed several very important roles. One of course was purely financial. A lot of money flooded into the church off the back of these sales in the same way that if you were rich enough you could pay for a chapel to be built and a monk to pray for you in perpetuity. In another sense, it was a practical solution to a difficult moral dilemma. Killing was wrong. There was a commandment about it and everything. The church told you that murder was wrong and yet then, as now, church and state sometimes demanded that you had another set of moral obligations, the fulfilment of which would lead you to commit murder, sometimes on the most grandiose of scales. If you were a soldier, a commander, a crusader, even someone just sending men off to fight, you were implicated in murder, church- or state-sanctioned though that might be.

  And if you imagine the chaos of a battlefield, the idea that a priest could go round to each and every one and hear confession and provide absolution, well, that was a difficulty. So, you pre-paid, as it were. You armed yourself for what you were about to do. Armour? Check. Sword? Check. Indulgence? Check.

  Of course, I’m putting a modern spin on something from a different age and a different culture, but the moral dilemma remains. In our secular society we sanction death by state in a variety of ways. Soldiers are seen as heroes by many – as indeed they always were. Though of course that rather depends on which side you are on. I remember an anecdote told to me by an elderly lady who had spent the Second World War in Silesia. She had been maybe ten miles from the death camps but her memory of the war was of running wild in the woods and of her older brother coming home in his new SS uniform. All she could think about at the time, she told me, was how shiny his boots were. I remember asking her what she thought about him now and she just shrugged and said, ‘Reg, he was my brother. What should I think?’

  What should she think? As it happened, she emigrated here after the war and married, briefly. The man she married had been a soldier in that same conflict. She loved him. He loved her. Her brother had been killed in the war and her strongest memory of him was always as a young man in his shiny boots.

  Why am I telling you this? Because human beings are complex and contradictory. Because my friend, Martia, grew old in a country with which her family had been at war. Her children and grandchildren were born here, raised here, taught that the side on which her brother fought had been wrong. And she agreed with that. But he was Still. Her. Brother.

  Tess stared at the page. Martia. Was he talking about Martia Richter?

  Nat was still gripping the phone to her ear. Still on hold.

  ‘Nat, was Martia Richter married? Did she have kids?’

  Nat, phone still at her ear, reached over for one of the folders on the desk behind her. She scanned the cover page, where such information as next of kin would be recorded. ‘No, she lived here since 1953, came over with her sister who married a George Barker. It was one of their children, Sally, married name Styles, who found her. Why?’

  So Fincher had conflated the two women to make a better story, Tess thought. But that wasn’t the point, was it. ‘Because I think Reg Fincher knew her,’ she said.

  FORTY-SIX

  ‘I got curious about Patrick’s friend, Daniel Goldman,’ Nathan told Naomi. ‘So I did a bit of digging.’

  ‘Curious? Why, Daniel’s a nice kid. His family seem like nice people. He lives with his aunt and uncle, I think.’

  ‘And grandfather,’ Nathan said. ‘And there’s nothing to worry about. I just have a natural curiosity, you know.’

  ‘You have a dangerous level of curiosity. But what nudged it this time?’

  ‘Gregory and I were just looking for patterns. Victims, friends of victims – you must have done similar searches when you were in the police?’

  Naomi nodded. True, she thought. You looked at everyone and their dog to see if there might be possible connections, however tenuous.

  ‘We could find nothing between the dead girl, Leanne, and Tom Reece or any of the other victims. But there is a link between Reece and Daniel. It’s the same kind of link that you have with him. Daniel’s parents died in a tragic accident when he was twelve and he was sent for bereavement counselling. Eventually, his therapy came via a local charity. St Hugo’s. It provides help and care to bereaved kids and Tom Reece referred him.’

  ‘So …’

  ‘So, when Daniel and Patrick helped their friend Sam to move, Patrick saw Reece talking to Daniel’s uncle. They seemed on friendly terms.’

  ‘So your curiosity was sparked and you looked further.’

  ‘And I found a link of my own. Though it’s tenuous and goes way back to before I was born, really.’

  ‘Gustav Clay,’ Naomi guessed.

  ‘Gustav Clay. My guardian and Daniel’s grandfather were almost certainly known to one another. Clay was involved in the intelligence game from just after the war. So, it seems was Josep Goldman. He settled here just after the war. He was only a young man at the time, came here first just as the Second World War started and he joined up to fight with the allies. His family was all but wiped out by the time the war ended but they’d managed to send him and his sister away and so saved their lives. Anyway, in 1942 he was recruited to SOE and later his career seems to have paralleled Clay’s. It’s unlikely they didn’t meet.’

  ‘And so.’

  ‘And so … probably nothing. But if the old man is anything like Clay, then he still has people he can call on if he feels his family are threatened. It’s unlikely his family even know what he did. He’s a businessman, owned a couple of small shops, then a bit of property. Made sure his kids got the best education they could. He’s not particularly active in the Jewish community, strictly secular for the most part. His older son is a doctor and his younger, Daniel’s guardian, is a lawyer. But you talk to anyone … to anyone who might know about the old man and they reckon he still wields a lot of influence and not just in high places.’

  ‘That’s so conventional it sounds like a bad joke,’ Naomi commented. ‘And you think the old man’s reputation is enough to give Reece pause? How would he know?’

  ‘I think men like our Doctor Reece also have a dangerous level of curiosity,’ Nathan said, returning to her the description she had used for Nathan himself.

  ‘So Daniel is safe. But not Daniel’s friends.’

  ‘That’s my theory. For what it’s worth.’

  Naomi nodded. ‘So what can we do?’

  �
��We can wait and watch. For now, that’s all. Reece may be an innocent man.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Naomi said. ‘You don’t think that any more than I do.’

  ‘Weight of evidence,’ Nathan said. ‘Once upon a time that would have mattered to you. You’d have been concerned only with what the law could prove.’

  Naomi said nothing to that. He was right, she thought. Now she felt so detached from what conventional resources could establish and act upon. So what did that make her? Naomi wondered.

  She left the question hanging. Sometimes, she thought, it was better not to ask.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Tess had read on. Reg Fincher had been a keen if erratic keeper of journals and diaries. Sometimes weeks would pass with barely a comment and then he would go through a spate of enthusiasm and write at length almost every day.

  She had gathered these chronologically and skimmed through those from the eighties, begun seriously with one from the early nineties and been rewarded more quickly than she could have hoped.

  When he first told me he had killed someone, I thought he was joking. He presented it as a hypothetical question. We’d both had a bit too much to drink and it was one of those stupid debates people get into when they drink too much and think too much.

  How much good would it take to balance a death is what he asked me.

  We’d been talking about rehabilitation. It’s an issue close to my heart and close to his too – though I think our reasons are very different. For him, I think, it’s more about redemption. Not perhaps in a religious way but in some logical, measured quantifiable form.

  The ancient Egyptians depict the weighing of a human soul after death. The soul is weighed against a feather. A pure, sinless soul would not tip the balance but one that was leaded with guilt and sin would. He reminded me of this and I told him I thought he’d need a bloody enormous lead feather if he wanted his soul to come out ahead if he really killed someone.