What Lies Beneath (Rutland crime series Book 1) Page 16

  It’s one of my earliest memories, I think. It’s certainly the clearest. And it’s the only one which hasn’t felt any more distant as time has gone on.

  I’m not a bad person. I’m not a murderer, no matter how much I’ve wanted the Cliftons dead every day of my life since.

  When old Arthur Clifton died, I felt joy — briefly. I thought the company would go to the wall like all the others. I hoped, somehow, I’d wake to news of it going bust and hear the entire family had lost all their ill-gotten gains. No such luck.

  When Roger Clifton inherited the company, I saw him as the walking embodiment of his grandfather. He’d been around when the valleys were flooded. He’d profited from what had happened, even if it hadn’t been his decision. And when I realised I might not see the day his business crumbled and his world fell apart, there was no way I could let that happen. I had to see him suffer, had to see him lose everything.

  I hadn’t counted on the other brother appearing. When I heard he’d taken on the company, I couldn’t sit back and let him profit from the misery of my family and all the others who lost their homes as a result of what his family did. He had to die too.

  I don’t know what happens now. I don’t care all that much. If the wife gets it, fine. She’s welcome to it. Rumour is she’d been shagging around behind Roger’s back for years anyway, so there’s a certain poetic justice in him being six feet under and her living off his money.

  You’ll want to know exactly what happened, won’t you? I have no desire to make life more difficult for you or to hamper your investigation. I’ve achieved what I needed to achieve. I’ve had my justice. It’s only fair you get yours, too. After all, that’s what we both want, isn’t it? Justice.

  Roger used to go out for evening walks in the country lanes. I know, because I spent quite some time watching his movements. On that Saturday evening, I parked up on one of the lanes, waiting for him. As he waked past my car, I hit him round the back of the head with a crowbar. I dragged him away from the road, into the bushes, just in case anyone came past, and strangled him with a plastic rope until he was dead. Then I dragged him into the boot of my car and waited until it was dark.

  I drove to Normanton, broke the lock on the gate with bolt cutters, and took my car right up to the church. I managed to reverse up quite close, then hauled his body up over my shoulder and carried him over to the rocks. I loved the idea of the symbolism of it all, knowing how much he hated religion. One final joke at his expense. Plus, I must admit I thought it might throw you off the scent for a little longer. Sorry.

  I was going to wait a day or two for things to die down, then disappear. But then I heard on the grapevine that his brother had turned up. I realised there was a chance he’d inherit the company, and it turned out to be true. At that point, I knew he had to die too. I watched his movements for a few days, but there didn’t seem to be much of a pattern. He stayed with Alice Clifton briefly, in Empingham. When I knew he’d spent so much time drinking in the pub, I waited for him. I was parked a little further up the road from the house. When he got there, I did exactly the same to him as I did to his brother. Then I drove home.

  I had some things I needed to put in place after that. Some final arrangements. But now they’re done.

  By the time you read this and have worked out who I am, I’ll be gone. The final part of my plan will be complete.

  At that point, finally, I’ll be truly happy.

  52

  Caroline’s hands were shaking as she phoned Dexter, and she was relieved to find he had his phone hooked up to the car’s speakers. She explained the situation — that someone had been in her house and she was almost certain it was the killer — and Dexter turned around immediately and headed back to her.

  She was waiting on the front doorstep when he arrived. The footsteps showed the intruder had already left, but she still didn’t feel safe in the house.

  Between them, they scoured the house from top to bottom, making absolutely sure there was no-one there. Every room, every cupboard, every corner of the attic, until Caroline’s heartbeat had returned to normal and she could tell herself quite reasonably and logically that there was no-one else in the house.

  She didn’t have a spare lock, and had no idea how the intruder had managed to unlock that one in any case. Dexter said he suspected it had been picked and that she should invest in a better lock — something Caroline immediately bumped up to the top of the growing home improvements list.

  When Dexter left, taking the letter with him, she locked the door and left the key in, pulled the security chain across and wedged one of Archie’s toys under the handle to add an extra layer of security. She knew she wouldn’t sleep well tonight, and wondered if she should even bother trying. With nothing else to do, and wanting to hear a safe and familiar voice, she picked up her phone and FaceTimed Mark.

  ‘Hey you,’ Mark said as he answered, his characteristic smile on his face.

  ‘Hi. How’s things? How are the boys?’

  ‘Yeah, all good. Think they’re starting to get a bit edgy. I forgot to mention to them that Grandma doesn’t have an Xbox.’

  Caroline laughed. ‘Yeah, I wondered how long they’d manage without Minecraft.’

  ‘Oh no, don’t worry. Josh managed to get hold of that on his phone.’

  ‘Course he did.’ Caroline had silently cursed their decision to allow Josh to have his first phone recently, but her job meant she knew the advantages and disadvantages. Knowing where Josh was at all times was key, as was his ability to get in touch with them should he need to — especially after the bullying he’d endured at his last school in London. These days, parental controls and security settings were easy to lock down, and on balance she felt it had been the right decision.

  She felt safer now, speaking to Mark, knowing there was no-one else in the house and anyone trying to get in would struggle to do so. Logically, she understood the intruder wouldn’t break in with her there. That was why he’d waited until she’d left the house earlier that evening. Indeed, she now felt certain Edward Picton was their man and that he hadn’t intended to visit the Wheatsheaf at Greetham at all, but had been playing them all along, and had instead broken into her house and left that letter on her coffee table.

  ‘You look… better,’ Mark said, pulling her back to the here and now.

  ‘Do I?’ She couldn’t see any conceivable way in which the last few hours would’ve made her look better than she had before.

  ‘Yeah. You look less… I dunno. Stressed. You seem more relaxed.’

  She didn’t feel it, but that wasn’t something she was about to admit. She wondered if perhaps opening up to Dexter had lifted a weight from her shoulders. The biggest burden still needed to be shifted, but she was pleased Mark had noticed a change.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Maybe a bit of time and space is all we need sometimes.’

  ‘I was thinking maybe we might come back first thing instead of in the evening tomorrow. Roads’ll be hell later on, with the rest of the bank holiday traffic. Plus the boys are missing you already.’

  ‘I miss them too.’

  She dearly wanted to open up to Mark, but this wasn’t the time or the place. She needed him to be here with her. Tomorrow night, she promised herself, was when she’d tell him everything.

  She said her goodbyes, then put the phone down on the coffee table. She needed to swallow her emotions for another day. She’d done it for years already, so what was another few hours?

  She felt nervous at the thought of having to tell him everything, but accepted it was for the best. Keeping things to herself hadn’t worked, and this was the only option she had left. Then she could worry about her job, and whether she’d even have one once this was all over. She had a distinct feeling she’d be left on paperwork duties, or that some decree would come from above that anything more serious than a cat stuck up a tree would be handed straight over to EMSOU. And that was before she even started to worry about the chemothera
py.

  There were too many things to worry about. Work provided her the focus and structure she needed to get through things. And in that moment, she knew what she had to do. She headed over to the pile of papers and documents Dexter had brought over, opened her laptop and got to work.

  53

  There was something comforting about not being constrained by the very specific and process-driven way things were done in the Met. It got results — that couldn’t be denied — but Caroline wasn’t sure it was any more successful than the holistic approach to policing she preferred.

  This was much more like the job she’d envisaged, spending a late Sunday evening hunched over a laptop and a pile of papers, crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s and trying to find a crack somewhere — anywhere — which might provide her with a breakthrough.

  As she flicked through the sheets of paper and read the notes left by Dexter, Sara and Aidan, she felt immensely proud of her little team. They were severely under-resourced in comparison to other major incident teams, and the thought of a team of four solving a double-murder case was practically unthinkable. Even a simple house burglary tended to involve a much larger team in most other forces. This was precisely why major cases tended to be handed over to their colleagues in EMSOU.

  She moved a pile of papers to one side, knocking a small object to the floor. She recognised it immediately as a USB stick. She put it in her laptop and waited for it to be recognised. As soon as she opened the folder, she noticed the name, which told her it was the CCTV footage from outside the library in Oakham.

  She loaded up the files and played them, skipping through to the time the death threat had been emailed to Roger Clifton. The footage was from inside the library. And as she watched, a cold chill ran down her spine.

  Her first thought was that Sara had clearly made a mistake. Caroline knew exactly who the person on the tape was. How had Sara not spotted him? But then the horrible truth dawned on her. Sara had never met this man. He’d never even been a suspect. Her heart thumped heavily in her chest as it all started to make sense and she realised she was staring at their killer.

  54

  It seemed to take an age for Dexter to answer his phone, but in reality it was only a few seconds.

  ‘Dex, I know who it is. I know who killed Roger and Arthur Clifton.’

  Dexter was silent for a moment. ‘Right… Who?’

  ‘Howard Smallwood. And no, it’s not another one of my wild theories. It all makes perfect sense.’

  ‘Smallwood? The history guy?’

  ‘Yes. He was on CCTV using his laptop in the library around the time that email was sent to Roger Clifton. He knew all about the history of the area and what had happened. Of course he did. It’s literally what he does. He was at the scene that morning, too, remember? The first time we met him, he stopped us as we came out of the Waterside Cafe. He knew we were police officers and he couldn’t help but give us his two cents. He’s been toying with us all along. Dex, how closely did you look at that list of families who were displaced from the Hambletons?’

  ‘Uh, well, not that closely. Sara and Aidan were doing most of the checking and cross-referencing.’

  ‘Exactly. And Sara and Aidan never met or contacted Howard Smallwood, did they? You and I met him at the Waterside Cafe. You and I met him in Otters. I doubt Sara and Aidan even knew his name. He was certainly never a name that was mentioned as a suspect, so why would they think anything of seeing him on the list of displaced families?’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I wish I was. But it gets even more tragic than that. “Mrs Annie Smallwood plus one boy, seven.”’

  ‘Howard Smallwood was seven years old?’

  ‘So it seems. And there was only him and his mother.’

  ‘So he’s not even sixty? Christ, he hasn’t aged well.’

  ‘That’s what a lifetime of bitterness and anger does to you. Seven’s an impressionable age for boys, trust me. He lost his family home, the house his mother had been bringing him up in single-handed. That’s going to leave one hell of a scar. There’s your motive. He said it himself in his letter. Kill the only remaining people responsible. Or, at least, responsible in his mind. We’ve got him at the scene of the murder, plus evidence of him sending a death threat to Roger Clifton a week and a half before he’s murdered.’

  ‘But why now? Roger and Arthur were only boys themselves when the villages were flooded. In fact, I don’t think Arthur was even born, was he?’

  ‘No, not until a year or two after. But a seven-year-old boy can’t go around committing murder, can he? Maybe the bitterness and anger built up too much over the years. He saw them as the continuation of Arthur Clifton Construction and held them responsible.’

  ‘But he could’ve done it at any point in his adult life, surely? Why wait until he’s pushing sixty and starting to slo… Oh, fuck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Dex, talk to me.’

  ‘When we met Smallwood at Otters, he made some comment about a lump on his brain that was ready to kill him. I think he called it an olive. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but do you remember what he said on the phone the other day? He said he was going away late Sunday night, so we’d have to be quick. He wasn’t talking about coming to him with research questions. It was a direct challenge to us to catch him. A deadline. He’s going away. Tonight. He’s going away to die.’

  ‘Oh shit.’ Caroline praised Dexter’s memory and keen eye for detail, although right now it had caused her more stress and anxiety than she’d felt in a long time. She looked at the clock. ‘Shit. Shit. We need to find him. Now. Where does he live?’

  ‘I don’t know. But we can find out. I’ll make a call now and get vehicle licensing to check his name locally. There’ll be something somewhere.’

  ‘Good. Go,’ she said, hanging up the call.

  Caroline paced the room, all the little details falling into place in her mind. How had she been so stupid? She’d naively believed Howard Smallwood to be a harmless — if a little eccentric — history buff. There was no way she’d ever have had him down as a double murderer, but all the signs were there, right from the start. He’d seemed keen, but she’d presumed that was just one of his eccentricities, his social awkwardness. He’d even made a point of telling them to get in touch with him if ever they needed—

  Yes! The business card! Caroline took the stairs two at a time and headed into her bedroom, going straight over to the pile of receipts, parking stickers and cards that covered the top of her dressing table, ready for their quarterly sort-and-file. Her hands shook with adrenaline as she quickly rummaged through them until she saw the one she wanted. Howard Smallwood’s business card.

  She looked at the address and did a quick bit of mental maths. Smallwood lived in Oakham, but the opposite side of town. Mark still had the car, and Dexter would be a good half an hour, even if he left immediately and put his foot down. She ran back downstairs, put on her comfiest shoes and sprinted as fast as she could.

  55

  Her legs felt like lead and the air burned in her lungs, but she had to keep pushing forwards. She’d never been the most gifted athlete, but it was amazing what a decent burst of adrenaline could do.

  As she sprinted down Station Road, past the train station and Station Approach leading to the Grainstore Brewery, she saw the barriers coming down across the main road, signalling that a train was coming. There had to be another way across. There must be. All she knew from sitting in traffic trying to cross the tracks on countless occasions was that the trains took absolutely ages to pass through.

  She felt her phone vibrating in her pocket, and wondered how long it had been ringing for. She took it out and saw Dexter’s name on the screen.

  ‘Dex,’ she said, panting.

  ‘I’ve got the address.’

  ‘I know. Me too. On his business card.’

  ‘Are you okay? You sound really out of breath.’
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  ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘Don’t. It’s too dangerous. I’ve put in a call and there are officers on the way. No idea how long they’ll be, though. I’m in the car too, going as fast as I can. Whatever you do, don’t go in there.’

  ‘I have to. We can’t wait. We’re going to lose him.’

  ‘It’s too risky. For the sake of a few extra minutes, we can’t take risks like that.’

  ‘This is his deadline, Dex. His countdown. This was his plan all along.’

  ‘Please. Stop. Listen, it’s not just the driver licensing database Smallwood was on. He’s got a gun licence, too. He owns hunting rifles. Firearms are coming over from Leicester. Just wait. It’s too dangerous.’

  She tensed at his words, knowing and understanding the risks, but at the same time unable to let go. Howard Smallwood’s actions had consumed her for two weeks. He’d made her sicker than she’d ever been. He’d ruined her marriage, almost ended her career.

  Caroline looked ahead and saw the footbridge on the other side of the main road, rising up over the train line and back down onto the Cold Overton Road on the other side of the tracks.

  ‘Dex, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you there.’

  56

  Howard Smallwood lived in a quiet street off the Braunston Road — not that any streets in Oakham were particularly lively at this time on a Sunday night.

  Caroline put her hand in her pocket and pulled out his business card again, looking at the number to make sure she’d got it right. She had. Number six. Third house up on the right.

  As she approached, she wondered if she should wait for her colleagues, but she knew time was of the essence. There was no sign of any police cars — nor of Dexter. She looked at her watch. There was no way he’d be here for a little while yet.