Blood Evidence Page 18

  “Yes, we have a supply cupboard which we only use for security items,” Richard says. He leans forward a little, eager at the chance to explain something. “There’s a switch in there that turns the cameras off and on, and a box that has a green light when it’s on. That gets all the footage, which is recorded in the, er, the sky or something like that.”

  “The Cloud?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” Richard says, obviously pleased with himself.

  Damn. One step forward, two back. If the footage is stored on the Cloud, then anyone could potentially have access to it.

  “Do you ever watch the footage back?” Will asks. Still prying away the plaster to find the nugget underneath that will break this whole thing open.

  “Oh, heavens, no,” Richard says. “Too awkward, watching yourself on camera. And besides, Jude is the only one with the thingy… the login.”

  “He’s the only one with access?” I ask again, feeling victory almost within my grasp.

  “Yes, yes,” Richard nods. “All too complicated for me.”

  I look at Will and I know he feels it too. That rush of success, of knowing that we’ve finally found something that will make a difference.

  This is our eureka moment. I’m excited already, just thinking about our next steps. We have him. We must have him.

  “Oh, is it that time already?” I say, faking a look at my watch. I don’t even care that it probably seems unrealistic.

  “You’re right, we’d better go,” Will says, taking my cue and getting up.

  “Nice chatting to you boys,” Richard says.

  “You too, Richard,” I say, and this time, I mean it.

  I’m calling Fairlight by the time we make it down the hall and out the front door, to stand over by my bike, away from potential prying ears.

  “Listen,” I tell him, as soon as he picks up. “We’ve got him. We know who did it.”

  Fairlight pauses. “If you were trying to get my attention, you have it,” he says.

  “Only one person has access to the security footage. You have to trust us on this, Fairlight. Please. It all makes sense.”

  “I’m still listening,” he says. “Convince me.”

  “Alright,” I say, going through it all in my head to put together the best argument I can. “Whose witness statement puts Cameron being the last person to see Isabelle? Or even has them meeting one another at all?”

  “Jude Hargreaves.”

  “And who was in the room, and then out of it, when Johnny accused Cameron of stealing his gold chain?”

  Fairlight can see where I’m heading. “Reed David and the waitress, but the answer you want is Johnny Hargreaves.”

  “Who was the last person to leave the Inn at night, and to attest that the place was empty when he went?”

  “Jude Hargreaves.”

  “Who would a drunk, tired woman on her own trust if she needed help getting away from a man she had decided she didn’t want to sleep with?”

  Fairlight sighs. “A security guard, like Jude Hargreaves. Is this theatricality needed?”

  “No, but it’s half the fun. Now, can you guess: who is the only person with access to the doctored security footage?”

  “I’ll go for Jude Hargreaves.”

  “We have a winner!” I proclaim, grinning.

  “You’re at the Inn now, I take it? Wait there. I’ll have someone pick you up. I’ll go and work on an arrest warrant.”

  “That easy?” I ask. “I thought you might need a bit more convincing.”

  “We’ve had our experts look at the footage,” he says. “They tell me something was deleted – and they’re recovering it as we speak. We weren’t too far away from going after him as it was.”

  Well. That’s disappointing. “We said it first,” I pointed out.

  “I’ll put it on your report card,” Fairlight said, hanging up the phone.

  Seems like the man has a sense of humour, on occasion.

  “We’ll wait for them to come get us,” I tell Will, and we wait.

  We wait, kicking stones over the gravel car park, checking the sky, checking the time. I start to feel like maybe humming a tune or playing I Spy.

  But it occurs to me that there’s something we really should talk about.

  “So,” I say, examining my hand as if there’s something extremely interesting about it. “Who’s B.J. Wong?”

  Will freezes solid almost immediately. He doesn’t say anything, and I can almost feel him trying to work out some kind of excuse or decide to play dumb or maybe just run away.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I say. “Don’t freak out.”

  “I’m not freaking out,” Will mutters, his voice strangely pitched.

  Oh, fuck. That probably wasn’t the best thing to say. When you tell an angry person to calm down, they don’t calm the fuck down. Telling someone with anxiety not to freak out probably does the same thing.

  I feel like I have to take control of this. Maybe my confrontational nature is one of my flaws, but I find the direct way is almost always the easiest, quickest, and least painful way in the end. I take him by the elbow, his arms crossed tightly over his chest, and pull him round to face me.

  “I mean it,” I say. “It’s no big deal. I just don’t know why you didn’t say anything.”

  “Say what?” Will asks. He can’t hold my eyes for more than a second, but there’s something ticking inside his head, I can see it. I’m not angry or disgusted or anything else. I need him to see that, understand it, and open up.

  “Well, come on,” I say, dropping my knees to get under his gaze as it drops to somewhere around my collarbone. He finds my eyes again, and this time I manage to keep them. “Gay erotica? You didn’t think that would be the kind of thing I like to read?”

  He stares at me for a long moment, then barks out a short laugh. Relief and amusement mixed together. I can feel the shaking through his elbow where I still hold it.

  “Are the books how you were keeping us afloat, before Coil?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says, shrugging. Everything about him is looser now, the tension flooding from him. He has been carrying a secret for a long time – probably longer than I even suspect. “I didn’t want you to know we were in trouble. You were dealing with… everything.”

  “You mean the same everything that you were dealing with?” I ask him. He looks away guiltily, and I sigh. “We’re supposed to be a team, you know. I could have helped.”

  “How?” Will asks. “You weren’t doing well. You know you weren’t. Someone had to step up and make sure we didn’t end up on the street.”

  “I could have asked my Dad,” I say.

  Will gives me a look.

  Okay, we both know I wouldn’t have asked my Dad. I probably would have tried every other alternative in the realm of possibility before it came to that. But I wouldn’t have let it get to that.

  “Will, baby, come on,” I say. “You think I wouldn’t go and get a job? Find a way to make money for the short term? I would never let this ship sink.”

  “You didn’t have to,” Will says. “I handled it.”

  I want to ask him if he did handle it, really. If he’s handled anything at all since we can back from California. But I don’t. Getting to the truth is enough, for now.

  “I read the first one,” I say, leaning back against my bike.

  “Seriously?” Will asks. His eyes are so wide I just want to laugh at him.

  “Of course. Once I figured it out, I just had to.”

  He hesitates, looks away and then back. “And?”

  I break out into a grin. “It was great, Will, baby,” I say, throwing an arm over his shoulders and ruffling his hair. “I loved every second of it.”

  “Even the…?”

  “Oh, you know that was my favourite part,” I laugh. “I’m not sure it was anatomically possible, but I loved it.”

  I laugh again at the pleased flush that spreads over his cheeks. See? I want to tell him. The
re was nothing to worry about.

  “I don’t know if I’ll do it any longer,” Will says. “Now that we have the money from Coil and cases are starting to come in a bit more often, we don’t need the extra cash as much.”

  “I think it’s great that you have a creative outlet,” I tell him. “Why not carry on? If there’s a lot of pressure, then I get it, but if you enjoy it then you might as well keep going.”

  Will shrugs, stepping out from under my arm. “Maybe I will,” he says. “How about you? Are you going to make your old man happy and pick up that guitar again?”

  I hope he can read from my eyes that this is not an area which is open for discussion. “No,” I say. My turn to cross my arms and look away.

  After the last time I played in front of my dear old Dad, all the powers of heaven and earth could not persuade me to pick up a guitar again. Being the son of a famous rock star comes with plenty of privileges, but it also comes with an equally large number of expectations. The way he looked at me that day, I couldn’t have been any smaller of a bug on the sole of his shoe.

  A police car pulls up alongside us, saving us from any more talk of daddy issues and lost creativity. Which is just as well, because I wouldn’t want to ruin this new honesty between Will and I by giving him some choice words about his relationship with his own father.

  Thirty – Will

  “Alright,” Fairlight said, turning to look at us over the back of the passenger seat. “Tell me everything you’ve got.”

  We didn’t even have to discuss it. I knew we had both come to the same conclusion. “Someone framed Cameron on purpose,” I said. “This wasn’t just a case of confusion. We think he has been deliberately tricked. He was set up as a fall guy.”

  Fairlight looked between the both of us with obvious and growing impatience. “You’re going to need to explain this to me, from the beginning.”

  “So, this is how it goes,” Ram said, leaning forward and sketching everything out with quick movements of his hands. “Cameron gets a message from a recruiter about a potential job opening that he can interview for. The thing is, Sennockian Prime is not a real company.”

  “I thought it didn’t sound familiar,” Fairlight grunted. “Go on.”

  “So, he ends up staying at the Highgate Inn, as suggested to him, I’m sure you will find, by said recruiter. This whole thing hinges on him being highly suggestible, so if he hadn’t taken the bait, the plot would have been off. In fact, if he picked a different hotel, I’d bet a hundred pounds that Isabelle Rupert would still be alive,” Ram said.

  “It’s absolutely key that he is quite naïve and easily led,” I agreed. “This wouldn’t have worked if he was the kind of person to trust his own feelings, or to not care what others think of him.”

  “Weird things started to happen as soon as he got there,” Ram said. “Things designed to shake his core, make him distrust himself. First off, Jude Hargreaves tells him that he’s had a complaint about harassment from a woman at the bar.”

  “And he didn’t get a complaint,” I said. “At least, that’s what we’re betting on. He just put this seed of doubt into Cameron’s mind that he had done or said something wrong. We can’t go back and check, but I would also put money on the fact that ‘Blue Monday’ would have been playing on the Inn’s internal sound system at that moment.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Fairlight asked, screwing his face up.

  “Everything,” I said.

  “Will’s right,” Ram confirmed. “The music is the centre of this whole scam. Have you heard of Pavlov’s dogs?”

  “I’m not some country bumpkin like you city boys seem to think,” Fairlight retorted. “He rings a bell, the dogs expect lunch. It’s a well-known concept.”

  “Alright, so this is the kind of reaction that was being carefully drilled into Cameron,” Ram said, taking Fairlight’s comment on the chin. “He gets told he’s done something wrong – convinced of it, in fact – and then this song plays. It gets tied in with this feeling of guilt and shame, as well as a sense of disconnection from what he thought he knew.”

  “He gets confused,” I added. “He has clear memories of what happened, and they don’t match up with what he’s being told. But because he’s a decent guy, he decides that he must be wrong – because if he offended someone, that has to be legitimate.”

  “This had to have been another test,” Ram said. “Checking that he was suitable as well as setting up those feelings of guilt. If it was me in that position, I might have taken the suggestion of the hotel in order to avoid having to spend time on researching somewhere else to go. I definitely wouldn’t have accepted that I was in the wrong.”

  Fairlight looked at Ram evenly for a long, long moment. Then he darted a look in my direction, and back again.

  “No comment,” he said.

  “Perhaps wise,” I said hastily, before any tension could build. “The next day, Cameron is already feeling stressed and on edge about his interview and the fact that he might have done something wrong. Johnny is loud and obnoxious, and like most people, Cameron doesn’t enjoy that.”

  “Johnny is in on it?” Fairlight asked.

  “No,” Ram said decisively. “We’ve spoken to him at length. He’s just a dead-end kind of guy with a tragic not-so-tragic backstory and a dead-end personality to match. I don’t think he’s even clever enough to take part in something like this and not get caught out.”

  “Harsh but fair,” Fairlight judged. “Continue.”

  “The gold chain incident,” Ram said. “Now, this is where things escalate. First, Jude comes in for lunch, hours before his shift is supposed to start. Incredibly, he’s been doing this on and off for over a month in order to make it look normal. Then, he walks by Johnny’s table, swipes the chain as Cameron is leaving, and keeps it concealed while waiting for Johnny to realise it’s missing.”

  “He leaves the restaurant when Cameron comes down, heads upstairs, and plants the chain in Cameron’s room. By the time Cameron goes back up, Jude is already waiting downstairs.

  “He adds the extra twist of an obvious lie about where he found the chain when he gives it back to Johnny, just to make him a bit suspicious. He wants there to be as much tension between them as possible. Oh, and the kicker.” Ram grinned. “‘Blue Monday’ plays when Cameron finds the chain, and when he gives it back to Jude.”

  “But he should have known that he didn’t take it,” Fairlight said. “Isn’t this a bit far-fetched?”

  “He started off doubting himself a little bit with the woman at the bar, and now he doubts himself a lot,” I explained. “It’s a gradual process, and each step ramps things up a bit higher. I strongly suspect that if at any point Cameron had failed to progress – if he had accused someone of planting the chain instead of thinking that he must have taken it – then the murder would not have gone ahead.”

  “The reason that the CCTV footage is missing for ten minutes that lunchtime is that it would have shown Jude leaving the restaurant, going in the direction of the stairs, and coming back down right around the time this all happened,” Ram pointed out. “The last nail in the coffin, so to speak, was to make Cameron actually do something bad. Someone ordered room service for Johnny’s birthday, but deliberately had it delivered to Cameron instead. Stacey was too lazy to read the card and check, and Cameron didn’t correct her. He took the champagne.”

  “Which had him nice and drunk,” I said. “So drunk that he would question his actions from the previous night – because he couldn’t remember what he had done. Which is why, when Jude told him that he’d seen him together with Isabelle, Cameron believed it.”

  “But Cameron was asleep the whole time,” Ram declared. “Jude took Isabelle aside somewhere – maybe told her he had called a taxi, or invented a security concern, or something like that. Anything to keep her away from others – concealed in the Dickens room, I would guess.”

  “Why there?” Fairlight asked.

&nb
sp; “Stacey went through the staff room, the bar, and the hallway,” Ram shrugged. “He couldn’t leave her in the open, or someone might have seen her. It just seems like the most convenient place.”

  “And then what?”

  “He waits until everyone else is gone, leads Isabelle – still drunk, still not sure what’s going on – to the bar. He stabs her, wearing gloves no doubt. He goes into the staff room and changes into clean clothes, stashes the bloodstained ones into a bag, and then does one last thing. He sneaks into Cameron’s room, knowing how fast asleep he is, and wipes blood onto his upturned hands. Maybe from his own shirt, I would guess by the position of the knife and where it would have been concentrated the most.”

  “And then he goes home, wipes the hour of CCTV footage that would incriminate him from the Cloud, and – well, maybe burns the clothes, or throws them in a lake, or something,” I finish. “We might not ever know what happened to those.”

  Fairlight turned around to face the front, watching the road ahead of us in silence. At length, he raised his eyes to the rear-view mirror. “It’s one of the most unrealistic, ridiculous things I’ve ever heard,” he said. “But since we’re bringing him in for questioning anyway, I’ll ask him about it.”

  As far as reactions went, it could have been worse.

  Fairlight took a call on his mobile, giving terse orders to whoever was on the other end, and then gave his colleague in the driving seat a few muttered instructions. For our benefit, he turned back to deliver the latest news. “They’ve picked him up,” he said. “For now, he’s been arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, for tampering with the tapes. Our IT team is working on gaining access to the Cloud files and may be able to recover any previous versions. We’ll head to the station now and I’ll go in to questioning with him.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Ram asked.

  “Nothing,” Fairlight said. “You’ve told me everything I need. Let us take it from here. If you don’t want to watch it all go down, I’ll have someone drop you back at the Inn.”

  “Oh, no, we’re watching this,” Ram grinned, catching my eye. I couldn’t help but grin back.