The House in the Woods (Atticus Priest Book 1) Page 24

  “Who’s this?”

  “Come on. Don’t insult my intelligence. That’s you.”

  Atticus made as if he was looking more carefully at the image. It was him; of course it was. He had noticed the security camera in the lobby of Freddie’s building and had made sure that his face was covered by the hood when he went inside. He looked at the image again and confirmed that there was nothing there that could identify him.

  She took the phone from him. “You were wearing gloves, I suppose?”

  “Mack—it wasn’t me.”

  She shook her head and stood up, straightening out her coat. “Fine,” she said, sliding the phone into her pocket. “I didn’t expect you to admit it. But you’ve got to stop. Breaking into the flat of the prosecution’s main witness? Come on. You couldn’t do that when you were in the police. You definitely can’t do it now.”

  “I’m doing what I’ve been asked to do.”

  “Break the law?”

  “No. Investigate the evidence.”

  She made her way towards the door as if she was about to leave, then turned back to him. “How easy do you think it would be for me to find evidence that puts you in London on Saturday night? How did you get there? Should I check the CCTV at the station? How did you pay for your ticket? You wouldn’t have been stupid enough to pay with a card, would you?”

  “Of course not. I’d pay cash.”

  “So you did go to London?”

  “No,” he said. “That was a hypothetical.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “Come on, Mack. I’ve told you it wasn’t me. If you think it was, we’d better continue this at the nick in front of a lawyer. I’ll call Cadogan.”

  She shook her head and sighed. “You know what you’d get for this kind of burglary?”

  “A year. I know. I’m familiar with the law.”

  “The CPS would throw the book at you. An ex–police officer with an axe to grind. Breaking into the property of a prosecution witness to find evidence to disrupt an ongoing case being overseen by the DCI with whom he had an affair.”

  “This is nuts,” he said. “You—”

  “A year might be on the optimistic side,” she said, talking over him. “You’d get seven years for aggravated burglary.”

  He almost corrected her—there would need to be damage to the property for aggravated burglary—but there was no way he could have known what had or had not happened at the flat. He stopped himself just in time.

  “Even if it was me,” he said instead, “which, before you say anything, it wasn’t, I don’t see the issue. Those emails corrected a very likely miscarriage of justice. Freddie Lamza was being paid to lie, Mack. He was going to give evidence about something that did not happen. And, if he hadn’t been found out, Ralph would probably have been convicted. Did I find that evidence? No, I did not. But if I had found it, you would be better to thank me than to come in here and threaten me.”

  She shook her head. She looked tired, wrung out. “I’m not threatening you. I’m warning you. For some reason—Lord knows why—I still think fondly of you. And you’re going to get into trouble. The kind of trouble that will make a mess of the rest of your life. And, next time, I’m not going to be there to get you out of it.”

  She turned back to the main door, but, before she reached it, she noticed the whiteboard that was covered with Atticus’s scrawled theories about Alfred Burns.

  She pointed at it. “Still?”

  “He’s out there,” he said. “He’ll do it again—you know he will—and I don’t want that on my conscience.”

  “Have you been taking your pills?”

  “This has nothing to do with that,” he protested.

  “Really?” she said. “Obsessive behaviour?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I am obsessed, because he’s still out there and he’s still dangerous.”

  “But you’re taking your medication?”

  He went over to the table and picked up the two bottles. He shook them and the pills rattled inside. “Happy?”

  Mack looked as if she might reply, but changed her mind and turned the key in the lock. She opened the door and made her way onto the landing. Atticus started after her, but he heard her footsteps on the stair and then the door opening and closing. He went to the bay window and looked out as she passed along the pavement beneath him, crossing the road and disappearing out of sight. She didn’t look back.

  He stayed in the window, staring, his thoughts running away from him. Had he thought about how Mack would react if he started to dismantle her case? It had crossed his mind, but he had pushed it down. He reminded himself: he was being paid to do a job of work. He didn’t owe the police anything. They had dismissed him without a second’s thought.

  Why would he care about making them look bad in court?

  He told himself that he didn’t owe Mack anything, either, but that one was a harder sell. It was her case; losing it would reflect badly on her, and losing it because the investigation had been sloppily handled would be a black mark against her record. And she was due to give the evidence that would close the prosecution case tomorrow.

  She was going to get destroyed.

  He locked the main door and went back into the bedroom. He closed the door to the stairs and lowered himself down onto the mattress again. Bandit padded over and lay down beside him. Atticus closed his eyes, tried to put the sadness and regret out of his mind, and waited for sleep to come.

  65

  Mack went home in a foul mood. She knew that Atticus was responsible for the emails, but knew—despite her threats—that she wouldn’t be able to prove it. She realised, as she walked through the quiet streets back to Bishopsdown, that it wasn’t so much what he had done that had annoyed her, but that she had been found wanting. Her first impression of Lamza had been negative, and she had never really trusted him; that all being said, his claim to have been in a relationship with Ralph had not been disputed, and there was no obvious reason that he would have put himself through the ordeal of a trial just so that he could perjure himself. Greed was a powerful motivator, and he had been susceptible to it.

  She had missed it.

  She had seen the weight and heft that his evidence would lend to the prosecution case, and had allowed it to blind her to his obvious shortcomings.

  She let out a long, tired sigh. She wondered how Atticus had come to the conclusion that Lamza was bent. She had worked with him for long enough, and she knew that his frequent flashes of insight were less magic and more the aggregation and assessment of small pieces of evidence that, once viewed as a whole, could reveal interesting truths. He had been a valuable asset in her team. He had made breakthroughs that were beyond anyone else; beyond her, too. She doubted that Lamza would have been able to fool them all if Atticus had been there to assess him.

  No sense in dwelling on that now. He was gone. Long gone. Water under the bridge.

  It was one in the morning by the time that she opened the front door to their house. She crept inside, listening at the foot of the stairs until she heard the deep in and out of Andy’s breathing. She poured herself a glass of water and took it upstairs. She checked the children—both were sound asleep—and then went into their room. Andy was sleeping deeply. They still hadn’t had the chance to discuss the argument from the skating on Sunday. She considered going to the spare room, but decided that would escalate things when all the two of them needed to do was talk. She undressed and slid between the cold sheets. Andy mumbled something, but did not wake.

  Mack decided to leave him be. There was no point in trying to untangle their emotions now. It could wait until the morning.

  66

  Mack found it difficult to sleep, and, when she awoke and checked the clock, she found that she had forgotten to set the alarm and had overslept.

  It was eight fifteen.

  Shit.

  She was due to give her evidence this morning. She had wanted to be there in plenty of time to run over
her witness statement again and to prepare herself for the ordeal she knew that she was going to have to endure.

  Today, of all days, was not the one to be late.

  Why hadn’t Andy woken her?

  She swung herself out of bed and stumbled to the head of the stairs. She listened for sounds of activity from the kitchen, but heard nothing. Andy and the kids must have already headed out. She went to the window and looked down onto the drive. Andy was getting the kids into the car, tossing their school bags into the boot and then making sure that they were strapped in. She knocked on the window, but Andy didn’t hear her—or ignored her—and got into the front of the car. He reversed out and drove away.

  She sighed.

  They couldn’t go on like this. They really needed to talk.

  She stumbled into the shower, put her hair inside a cap to keep it dry, and quickly washed. She dried herself and dressed. She couldn’t find the kitten heels that she wanted, so had to make do with a pair of black patent brogues that she had picked up on a whim from Next.

  She checked her watch—eight thirty—and decided that she would have to get breakfast at the court’s café, and hurried outside.

  She tried to start the car.

  Nothing happened.

  Shit.

  She tried again.

  The engine spluttered once, twice, and then died.

  She slapped her hands on the wheel.

  Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!

  She took out her phone and stared at it helplessly. Lennox wouldn’t be near enough to come and pick her up, and she couldn’t really call the nick and have them send her a car. She found her thoughts drifting to Atticus, but dismissed them immediately. He was the last person in the world whom she could call.

  No.

  The absolute last.

  She called Triple 7 and sat back in her beached car, waiting for the taxi to arrive.

  67

  Atticus took his usual seat as the preliminaries for the day’s evidence were dispensed with. Abernathy rose and cleared his throat.

  “The prosecution calls Detective Chief Inspector Mackenzie Jones.”

  Mack came into the court and crossed to the witness box. She was wearing a slim-cut navy suit with a white shirt and brogues. Her jewellery was limited to a simple watch and earrings. She stared across the court until she found Atticus and locked eyes with him. She laid her hand on the Bible, cleared her throat and—still looking at him—spoke into the microphone.

  “I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “Thank you,” Abernathy said. “Could you introduce yourself, please.”

  “Detective Chief Inspector Mackenzie Jones, senior investigating officer at Wiltshire police.”

  “Thank you. Could we begin by giving the jury a flavor of your role in this case?”

  “Of course. As senior investigating officer, my role is to capture and examine all of the evidence as a whole, to decide on investigative strategies and to manage a team of detectives charged with carrying out the investigative actions that I set.”

  “Thank you, DCI Jones,” Abernathy said. “I’d like you to go over your own experience on Christmas Eve last year.”

  Mack spoke succinctly and authoritatively, furnishing the facts and leaving out her opinion until she was asked for it. She was an experienced and persuasive witness. She proceeded to describe the events of Christmas Eve from her perspective, including her interactions with Ralph Mallender; she defused Lennox’s concern that there was still someone inside the property; she spoke of the arrival of the armed response vehicles and the storming of the house. She went over the time that she’d spent inside the property, reinforcing the evidence that had been given by the other officers who had attended that night.

  Atticus knew from his own experience that the exercise was designed to highlight the strongest points of the prosecution case: the family argument on the afternoon of Christmas Eve; the ability to exit the house through the coal hole, so that the killer might still have been inside; the new evidence from Dr. Sandeau demonstrating that Cameron Mallender was an unlikely suspect. Abernathy stayed away from any reference to Freddie Lamza’s discredited evidence, and, while he had no choice in that, its absence was obvious and underlined the fact that the Crown’s case was significantly weaker now, and perhaps even crippled.

  Abernathy continued to a review of Mack’s interviews with Ralph, allowing her to set out how her suspicions as to his involvement had developed over time.

  “We were operating on the basis of the evidence before us,” she said. “The first few days suggested that Cameron was the most likely suspect. The house appeared to be locked from the inside, and the murder weapon was close at hand.”

  “But not close enough,” Abernathy said.

  “That’s right. We initially believed it was possible that the pistol might have ended up there after Cameron discharged it, but subsequent expert analysis has rendered that less likely.”

  “And what do you think happened now?”

  “I think that a third party shot the family and wanted to make it look as if Cameron was responsible. They wanted us to think that it was a murder-suicide.”

  “And that third party?”

  Mack looked to the dock. “I believe it was the defendant.”

  “I don’t want to preclude the defence’s cross-examination of you, DCI Jones, but their statements suggest that they will say that you were unduly influenced by the family of the victims, and that it is in their best interests that the defendant is convicted since, if that happens, it will be they—and not he—who stand to inherit the estate. What do you say to that?”

  “The investigation was not influenced by external pressure in any way.”

  “But you spoke to the family?”

  “Of course. They made their concerns known, but it didn’t influence us at all. We simply followed the evidence as we found it. At first, the evidence pointed to Cameron Mallender. As we investigated further, it pointed more clearly to the defendant.”

  Abernathy moved on to ask how Ralph had appeared to Mack when she first spoke to him, and then about the content of the interviews that had been conducted both prior to and after his subsequent arrest. Atticus listened. She maintained her composed delivery, but her answers started to sound defensive, unsurprising given the fresh context that had been delivered by the evidence heard yesterday. Mack had already been given a tough time in the papers following the abrupt about-turn from Cameron to Ralph as the main suspect; some less charitable legal commentators had suggested that the investigation had been botched, and there had been calls for an enquiry to establish what had gone wrong. Atticus had always found those calls hysterical, but he knew that they would be made again now that it looked as if the investigation had taken another wrong turn.

  Atticus had sympathy. An enquiry like this was a living, breathing thing, and it was normal for it to take divergent courses when new material was presented. His confidence in his own abilities lent him the belief that he would not have made those errors, but he was not about to damn Mack because she had.

  Abernathy finished the evidence-in-chief after an hour. “Thank you, Detective Chief Inspector,” he said. “Please remain there—I’m sure that my learned friend will have some questions for you.”

  Abernathy sat down and Crow took to his feet.

  “I most certainly do,” he said.

  Atticus felt nauseous.

  68

  Crow smiled and laced his fingers behind his back.

  “Detective Chief Inspector,” he said, “I’d be surprised if this trial has gone the way that you thought it would. Would that be right?”

  “I don’t know that I’d say that.”

  “But you can’t seriously still think that the defendant is guilty?”

  “That’s for the jury to decide.”

  “We can agree on that, at least,” Crow said, looking over at t
hem with a meaningful arch of his eyebrow. “Do you think that the defendant is guilty beyond all reasonable doubt?”

  “Again, Mr. Crow—that’s for the jury.”

  Crow left a short pause as he flipped through his trial bundle.

  “You have said that your initial suspicion was that Cameron Mallender was responsible for the murders.”

  Mack nodded. “That’s right.”

  “What changed to make you suspect the defendant?”

  “The evidence made it clear to me that Cameron could not have been responsible and that there was a strong case against the defendant.”

  “You allowed yourself to be pushed away from Cameron and onto Ralph?”

  “‘Pushed’?”

  “Influenced.”

  She shook her head. “The direction of the case changed, but we were not influenced by anyone.”

  “Not the family?”

  “No, sir. Not at all.”

  He flipped pages again, leaving a weighty pause. It was a clichéd move, but that didn’t make it any less effective. Mack was doing a good job of maintaining her composure in the face of the avalanche of criticism and derision that she must have known was about to fall upon her, but Atticus was astute enough to see the signs of her discomfort: she reached up with her left hand to touch her neck, then laid both hands on her legs and gently rubbed them down to her knee. Pacifying gestures. It was difficult to notice what the hands were doing when the brain was focused on something else.

  Crow settled on a page. “How did you feel when Freddie Lamza made contact with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I imagine it must have felt like a significant moment?”

  “It did.”

  “And you must have thought his evidence was very important?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We did.”

  “I imagine that you and your team must have been thrilled.”