The Killing Habit Page 6

  ‘Right,’ Thorne had said.

  She was certainly not the ‘old lady’ type he had joked about with Tanner, and neither was the forthright young couple Thorne had spoken to an hour earlier at their flat in Archway. In retrospect, Brigstocke had not been wrong when he’d asked Thorne to interview the victims. Thorne still believed that the cat killings were part of a pattern that already involved human casualties, but there was no doubt that the slaughter of animals on this scale, the ritualistic display of the corpses, was aimed every bit as much at the people who had loved them and would be left to mourn.

  Their pain was part of it.

  Thorne had once adopted a cat of his own, inherited, ironically, from a murder victim, and named before Thorne had discovered that he was actually a she. The name Elvis had stuck, the favour for a dead woman turned out to be a blessing, and Thorne found himself remembering the sing-song yowling as he’d torn at a pouch of food or poured treats into a bowl, the cat nosing urgently at his shins. He remembered his return from work feeling an awful lot more pleasant than it had before.

  He stopped at the end of the road and waited for a gap in the traffic. He selected a CD, turned it up, thinking about the woman he’d just left, hosing blood from her path.

  Elvis had died relatively young, but her death had been a good deal more peaceful than those afforded the unfortunate animals like the one in the photograph. Buried in the back garden, as opposed to being laid out, headless, on a front lawn, or displayed in pieces beneath the owner’s bedroom window.

  He/she was like one of the family…

  It’s what Thorne had expected them to say, and, when it was said, they meant every word.

  He had got the statements Brigstocke and those above him so desperately needed. A few soundbites to feed to the press, that all-important impact. There, in the owner’s words, crackling with anguish while they scrabbled for a tissue, and later etched across their faces when Thorne had shaken their hands and assured them that he would be doing everything he could.

  When he had meant every word.

  When a Willie Nelson song kicked in, Thorne thought immediately of Helen and her persistent, if inaccurate, complaint that country songs were all about dead or dying dogs. He tried to imagine the outcry if it were dogs being butchered rather than cats, and decided there would have been riots in the streets long before now.

  He pulled out into slow-moving traffic heading south.

  That kitten had been cute, no question about it. Ginger and white. Same colouring as Elvis.

  NINE

  By the time the necessary paperwork had been completed, the forensic samples taken and the detainee declared medically fit for interview, it was almost seven o’clock when Nicola Tanner sat down to talk to the man she believed was responsible for the murder of Adnan Jandali.

  A man who had already been in custody for almost five hours.

  She turned on the digital recorder and cautioned the man sitting opposite her. She announced the attendance in the interview room of herself, DS Dipak Chall and Angela Hooper, the duty solicitor. Then, after half a minute glancing through her notes – for effect as much as anything – she looked up at her suspect and shook her head.

  ‘Only three months since you were released, Andrew.’ She turned to Chall, who tutted theatrically. ‘Not going very well, is it?’

  Andrew Evans sat with his arms folded and his head down. ‘No.’

  ‘A little louder please,’ Tanner said. ‘For the tape.’

  Evans slowly raised his head. ‘No. It’s not going very well.’

  Tanner looked at him. He was tall and well muscled, with cropped hair and craggy features which would have been enough to scare Adnan Jandali even before he’d seen the gun. The man’s appearance now, unshaven in trackies and T-shirt, was startlingly at odds with the image she had carried into the interview room with her: the sleek, high-flying city trader she knew that Andrew Evans had once been.

  That had been a long time ago, before the crash.

  Before two crashes…

  Chall looked up from his own notes. ‘Eighteen months of a three-year sentence for causing death by dangerous driving. You were lucky.’ He looked for a reaction, but saw none. ‘Fourteen years is the maximum sentence now, but they’re talking about bringing in whole life tariffs for people who did what you did, same as manslaughter. You were certainly a damn sight luckier than the kid you ran down while you were sending messages on Facebook.’

  Now, Tanner saw Evans’s face change. A tightening of the jaw and a tremor in his cheek. He swallowed, and she wondered if he was about to be sick.

  Hooper leaned forward. ‘I’m sure we’re all very grateful for the update on sentencing guidelines, but, with respect, this is ancient history. What’s any of it got to do with the offence for which my client has been arrested?’

  Chall shrugged. ‘It’s useful background.’

  ‘In what universe?’ Hooper said.

  ‘I think Miss Hooper’s probably got a point,’ Tanner said. ‘Clean slate, right?’ She reached for a sheaf of fresh documents and straightened them in front of her. She tugged down the sleeves of her blazer. ‘Do you know a man named Adnan Jandali, Mr Evans?’

  The solicitor turned and looked hard at Evans.

  ‘No comment,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ Chall sighed and folded his arms. ‘We doing that?’

  ‘Have you ever met Adnan Jandali?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Have you ever visited Mr Jandali’s home at 42, Athlone Gardens, Wanstead? It’s the ground floor flat, if that helps.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Mr Evans, you’re perfectly entitled to sit there and say “no comment” until you’re blue in the face, but you do know we’re entitled to draw an adverse inference from your silence, right?’ Chall looked at Hooper. ‘You did mention that?’

  ‘Of course I did.’ Hooper said it casually, but did not look best pleased at having her professionalism questioned. ‘My client is simply exercising his right to silence, as enshrined in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 and protected by the European Court of Human Rights. Fair enough?’

  Chall nodded, as though impressed.

  ‘OK then, Mr Evans,’ Tanner said. ‘I’ll tell you all about Mr Jandali, shall I? It’s quite a story.’ She sat back. ‘Adnan Jandali came here as a refugee from Syria, just after his wife was killed and right around the time you were getting banged up, as a matter of fact.’ She pulled a photograph from a plastic wallet and slid it across the table. ‘Here he is. Now I can’t tell you exactly how Mr Jandali got here, but you can be sure it was a hell of a journey. Selling his house for peanuts to buy a flight from Beirut to Istanbul most probably, then using what little money he had left to pay some smuggler with a dodgy boat to get him across to Greece, then on to a refugee camp in France. Him and his two children.’

  Chall produced another photo and pushed it across the table. Jandali, smiling; two small boys wearing football shirts, one on either side of him. Hooper cleared her throat and appeared keen to say something, but Tanner’s look seemed to change the solicitor’s mind.

  ‘When he finally arrived here as an asylum seeker, Mr Jandali’s children were taken into care by social services, while he spent the best part of three months in a detention centre in Harmondsworth. Things started looking up when he was finally released, reunited with his children and given accommodation at the address I’ve already mentioned. The one you may or may not be familiar with.

  ‘But this isn’t a story with a happy ending, unfortunately. Because a couple of months ago his children were taken away again, as a direct result of the drug habit Mr Jandali developed during his time in the detention centre.’

  Tanner stopped to look at Evans, at the sheen of sweat across his neck and forehead that she had noticed as soon as he’d been brought in. She wasn’t sure exactly what the custody nurse had needed to give him, but she recognised a dependency of some sort when she saw it.<
br />
  ‘You’d think things couldn’t get much worse for Mr Jandali, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You’d hope,’ Chall said.

  ‘As it was, they got a lot worse, because in the early hours of yesterday morning he answered the door to someone who promptly shot him in the neck. He bled to death on his doorstep.’

  She looked at Evans, but he refused to meet her stare. Pulling a bottle of water from her bag, the solicitor looked uncomfortable, though it was hard to tell if she was sickened by the story or by Tanner’s emotionally manipulative telling of it. She might just have been thirsty.

  ‘Does that last part ring a bell, Mr Evans?’

  Evans shifted in his seat, pushed a hand down the neck of his T-shirt and rubbed at his chest. ‘No comment.’

  ‘My client’s assertion is that he was at home with his wife at the time of the alleged offence,’ Hooper said. ‘And that his wife will be happy to confirm it.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ Tanner said. She nodded to Chall. ‘We will obviously be talking to Mrs Evans at the earliest possible opportunity.’

  ‘All right, so why don’t we go back a bit?’ Chall glanced down at his notes. ‘Three weeks ago, officers were called to a flat in Mercer Road, Tottenham. Is that familiar?’ He looked at Evans, then shook his head. ‘No? Never mind. A woman had called the police after hearing screaming, then witnessing a violent altercation on a neighbour’s doorstep. A man in a motorcycle helmet waving a gun around, by all accounts. Now initially, the man she claimed had been threatened denied all knowledge of the incident, but finally his girlfriend told officers that there had been such an argument and gave us a full statement.’

  ‘Gave us a very good description of the gun,’ Tanner said. ‘One that matches the weapon used to kill Adnan Jandali.’

  ‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’ Hooper put her water down and leaned towards Tanner. ‘A very good description of the gun? A small black one? How many guns do you think that might be describing?’

  Tanner nodded. Hooper had been given full disclosure as to the evidence against her client. She was only doing her job, but her objections now were half-hearted at best.

  Because she knew there was far worse to come.

  ‘Do you ride a blue Yamaha YZF motorbike?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘A lot of people ride motorbikes,’ Hooper said.

  ‘It’s a rhetorical question really,’ Tanner said. ‘We know you do, because we seized it shortly after you were arrested and it’s now being examined, together with your motorcycle helmet. It’s the same bike… I’m sorry, the same model of bike that was ridden by the man who murdered Adnan Jandali.’

  Evans stared at her. He suddenly looked terrified.

  ‘And the reason we know about the gun that was used to murder him is because we have that, too.’ She reached inside the wallet again and slid a photograph of the gun across the table. ‘The killer got careless and dropped it when he was speeding away from the crime scene. Have you seen that gun before, Mr Evans?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Really?’

  Chall leaned across. ‘You forgot about the print, guv.’

  Tanner rolled her eyes. ‘See, any one of us can forget things, Mr Evans. I somehow forgot to mention that we got a fingerprint off the gun that was used to shoot Adnan Jandali.’

  ‘Several fingerprints,’ Chall said.

  ‘Your fingerprints.’

  Evans was breathing heavily now and blinking fast. He bent his head to wipe his face on the sleeve of his T-shirt. He said, ‘No.’

  ‘Just “no”?’ Chall looked confused. ‘Do you not want to add the word “comment” on to the end of that?’

  ‘We were able to get a match so quickly because your prints are on record, thanks to all that ancient history.’ Tanner flashed a smile at Hooper. ‘We should have the DNA results back at any time and obviously we’ve got all that on record, too.’ Tanner had been a little optimistic when she’d told Thorne that the DNA results would be back before the end of the day, but she was still confident that when they did arrive they would provide a match for Andrew Evans.

  Tanner looked at Hooper again. The solicitor had nothing to say.

  ‘Listen, Mr Evans. The truth is that Miss Hooper has given you advice which in certain circumstances can certainly be to a suspect’s advantage. On this occasion, though, I would advise you to seriously reconsider.’ She left it a few seconds, watched him squirm. ‘Now, bearing in mind everything I’ve just told you, all the evidence I’ve now disclosed and the further evidence we’re expecting any time, I’m going to ask you a very straightforward question. Did you kill Adnan Jandali?’

  Evans shook his head, kept on shaking it.

  ‘This interview is being filmed,’ Tanner said, ‘but for the benefit of the sound recording?’

  Evans glanced at Hooper. Whispered, ‘No comment.’

  Tanner exchanged quick nods with Chall. She checked her watch, announced the termination of the interview, and turned off the digital recorder.

  ‘We’re done,’ she said. ‘For now.’

  Outside the interview room, Tanner moved close to Evans as a uniformed officer stepped across to take him by the arm.

  ‘You might want to sleep on it, Mr Evans. See if you feel a bit more talkative in the morning.’

  He looked at her, wincing a little at the officer’s grip. ‘You think I’m going to sleep?’

  Tanner didn’t care a great deal either way. ‘Be just like old times for you.’ She took a few steps away, then turned back to look at him. ‘Anyway, it’ll be worth trying to get used to a cell again. Because I don’t think your story’s going to have a happy ending either.’

  TEN

  Coming through the front door into Helen’s flat, Thorne heard voices from the living room and was not overly thrilled to recognise one as belonging to Helen’s younger sister, Jenny. He thought he’d come in quietly enough, so half considered turning round again and waiting in the pub down the road until she’d gone. Then Helen called his name, so, after a few whispered curses, he plastered on a smile he hoped would do the trick and went through to say hello.

  He didn’t bother sitting down.

  Alfie ran across for a hug, which made Thorne feel slightly less miserable, but the four-year-old was clearly not in the mood for chatting and quickly moved back to his spot on the floor in front of the sofa.

  To his urgent appointment with the Gruffalo on Helen’s iPad.

  Jenny’s greeting was no more effusive than Thorne’s had been, so he spent a couple of minutes talking to Helen about his day while her sister carried a glass of wine across and sat with Alfie, who – much to Thorne’s delight – seemed entirely oblivious of Auntie Jenny’s company.

  Thorne told Helen about his meetings with victims of the cat killer and about the scam he and Tanner had worked on Brigstocke. She warned him that the DCI was a lot smarter than Thorne sometimes gave him credit for, that he’d probably known exactly what was going on and that Thorne should probably stop feeling too smug about it.

  Thorne agreed, with part of it, at least. Smug was the last thing the day had left him feeling.

  He ran through a few of the day’s other highlights, which took no time at all, as he couldn’t think of much beyond his phone conversation with Melita Perera and his exchange with the surly server in the canteen. It took Helen even less time to talk about her own day, but that in itself was not unusual. It was rare for a shift on a child abuse investigation team to provide the stuff of banter or idle conversation.

  If Helen talked about her work at all, it would certainly not be in front of her sister. Her team colleagues aside, it would not be to anyone but Thorne, and when she chose to do so, it was often at an hour when she had to wake him up first.

  There were some things best talked about in the dark.

  Thorne looked across at Helen’s sister, who was necking her wine and pretending to be fascinated by the Gruffalo’s on-screen antics. H
e pulled a face that only Helen could see, like he’d sucked a lemon then swallowed a turd, and announced that he was going for a shower.

  Beneath water almost hot enough to take his skin off, Thorne stood and thought about those moments of the day that were rather more mundane and far more depressing than the events he’d recounted to Helen. The two hours spent with Tanner at the computer before he had set off for Archway and Gospel Oak, while Tanner had been waiting to question her murder suspect. The two of them looking again at a spate of killings that might have followed another of a very different sort.

  The workout and the cool down.

  He moved the soap around where necessary, closed his eyes and let the water wash across his face. He thought about white and ginger fur matted with gore and those whose loved ones could never be replaced. The ones he had yet to find, the missing wives and daughters – because the earlier victims would be women, almost certainly. It was something else he had talked to Melita Perera about. Whatever this individual thought he was doing, and however much pleasure he derived from doing it, his actions were about power, and like most of his kind he would have chosen to target those he believed to have less of it than he did.

  After drying off in the bathroom, Thorne hurried through to the bedroom with a towel wrapped round him and listened to 5 Live while he got dressed. Driving home, he had envisaged an evening in tracksuit bottoms and perhaps a faded Hank Williams T-shirt, but, for reasons he wasn’t clear about, he did not want Helen’s sister seeing him dressed quite that casually, so he pulled on jeans and a clean polo shirt. He put his shoes back on.

  Ammunition, that’s what it was. He did not want to give her any more ammunition, knowing that at some point she’d find some way to use it against him with Helen.