Dont let him in, p.25
Don't Let Him In, page 25
‘The timing, though,’ she probed. ‘Wouldn’t the ex-boyfriend have sent them right after she broke up with him, not months later after she dumped you?’
He didn’t react at first and she wondered if he was unable to wriggle out of that one until he said, ‘She didn’t tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’
‘He couldn’t have sent them any earlier.’ Then he added, ‘He was in prison, Rebecca. Claire’s former partner is a bad man. He is a crook and a fraudster who got two years. Those old photos landed on the headmaster’s desk a couple of weeks after he got out.’
‘Why didn’t Claire think he sent them then? Why did she automatically assume it was you?’
‘Because he’s her weak spot,’ he explained. ‘Just like she was mine. I think she still loved him. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were back together again now. When she talked about him, she would always make excuses for him, saying he hadn’t done all the things people said he had. She can’t allow herself to see the truth about him, let alone believe it, not ever. If she admits to herself that he sent those pictures, then her whole world comes crashing down.’
Rebecca greeted that statement with silence. Claire Tilbury seemed like a sympathetic and credible witness to the events of her former life, but now Dominic appeared contrite and genuinely ashamed. He had admitted a lot of what had been said about him was accurate, but was he telling the entire truth now and had he really changed? Had Claire been misled by a former boyfriend whose dishonesty was a proven fact?
‘You know, Rebecca, it doesn’t matter what Claire believes, only what you believe.’
He waited expectantly for an answer.
‘I’ll be honest with you, Dominic,’ she told him, ‘I don’t know what to believe any more.’
41
Rebecca did not exactly end her working relationship with Dominic that day, nor did she leave him with the false hope that she could ever fully trust him again. Their eventual parting was an uneasy one, with him mumbling that he had to be going, while she said she had a lot to think about, and that was exactly what she did for the rest of the day. She hoped her guarded response to the allegations from his former girlfriend was enough of a hint for him to stay away from her, at least for a while.
As well as the trust issue, Rebecca reasoned it was possible she might not need any more contact with the policeman. Dominic had probably already told her everything he knew about Eriston’s murders and missing persons cases. Perhaps she could simply continue on her own from now on.
Her mood was lightened when Alan paid her an unannounced visit that evening.
‘Is this OK?’ he asked. ‘I’d have messaged you but I wanted to have a word.’ His face told her it was bad news.
He’s breaking it off. He’s seeing someone else. He really is married with five kids.
But it was none of those.
‘I’ve got to go away for a bit. I’m sorry.’
‘Where are you going?’ She didn’t bother to disguise the disappointment in her voice. His timing was impeccable. She could have done with the one man she could rely on right now.
‘Edinburgh. It’s only for a few days. I do some work for a company that rents out student accommodation. I agreed to the job before you came back to Eriston. Will you be OK?’
She forced herself to sound brighter then. It wasn’t his fault and he would only be away a few days. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she assured him.
‘I could leave you a key to my house. You could keep an eye on it for me.’ They both knew what he really meant. If she felt edgy in the old house on her own, she could escape to his. She probably wouldn’t actually take him up on this but it was nice to have the option and to know he was thinking of her.
For the next two days Rebecca was in limbo. With Alan gone and Dominic keeping his distance Rebecca had no one to talk to. She had spoken to everyone she needed to about her dad and felt as if she was no further forward. Even her negotiations with Connor were concluded. Now all she could do was wait for the sale of her house to go through, so she could move out and move on.
Rebecca had not heard the postman that morning but she found a letter lying on the mat by the front door. She picked it up and examined the envelope. Rebecca’s name and address were written on it in a childish scrawl. Her surname was misspelled as ‘Coal’.
Intrigued, she opened the envelope and pulled out a single folded piece of thin cheap paper. The letter was from Simon Kibbs, a reply to hers just when she had started to give up hope of ever receiving one. The few words were in block capitals with no punctuation.
HMP FRANKLAND, BRASSIDE, DURHAM DH1 5YD
DEER MISS COAL
THANK U FOR YOUR LETTER AND FOR COMING TO SEE ME SOON YOUR DAD WUZ KIND SO THAT IS OK AND I HOPE U CAN HELP ME WITH MY PAYROLL
I HAVE DONE THE FORM.
YOU CAN COME AND SEE ME NOW
SIMON KIBBS
Payroll? Then she realized he meant ‘parole’. When they were out on the boat, Jack had said Simon sometimes got his words mixed up. Could she help him with his parole? Rebecca wasn’t sure about that, but she hoped he could help her to piece together what had happened on the day Rose died, which might bring her one step closer to solving the mystery of her father’s murder.
When Rebecca looked into the process of arranging a prison visit, she learned that Simon had to put her on his approved visitor list, by filling out a VO, visiting order, but then she remembered his letter. I HAVE DONE THE FORM. Sure enough, she discovered she was already on his list and able to book an appointment.
When she arrived at the prison, Rebecca waited almost an hour before they let her in. She expected to be shown into a busy room filled with prisoners and their families and wondered how she could speak to Simon openly in front of so many people without them being overheard. The prison officer assigned to escort Rebecca told her that this was not how things worked with Simon.
‘He hardly gets any visitors and we make special arrangements when he does. You’ll be seeing him privately but I will be in the room with you at all times. That’s how the governor wants it.’ His tone told her that if she was unhappy with that arrangement, they wouldn’t be offering her an alternative.
‘You don’t think he is dangerous?’
‘Well, he is a murderer,’ he answered, as if she didn’t know this. ‘But that’s not the reason. Simon is a VP.’ When it was clear she did not understand what he meant, he added, ‘A vulnerable prisoner. We have to keep him separate for his own safety. He’s been attacked before. They all know about him in here and what he did to those women. He was front-page news. If we put him on a normal wing, he wouldn’t last five minutes.’
With his explanation concluded they walked the corridors in silence until they eventually reached the interview room, which contained one of the prison’s most notorious inmates. To the outside world Simon Kibbs was a beast, a modern-day Jack the Ripper who had gutted two women for little or no reason and would surely never be allowed to see the light of day again, but Rebecca saw a small cowed man who appeared deceptively harmless.
Even though Rebecca knew he would be older, she was still taken aback to see the almost middle-aged man the young boy had become. Simon was in his late thirties, his hair was receding, his glasses had thick lenses and his skin was as pale as you might expect from someone banged up on his own for most of the day. He didn’t greet Rebecca, instead he just said, ‘I thought I’d have to call it off. I couldn’t find my glasses. They were under my bed. I’d lose my head, if it wasn’t glued on.’ And he laughed softly, as if he had just made that joke up.
She sat down opposite him, with only a table between her and the convicted killer. The prison guard stood off to one side, arms folded, watching them. ‘Thank you for seeing me, Simon,’ she said.
‘I only did it because your dad was nice and now he is dead.’ So he knew about that. ‘I hope you are nice too.’
‘I try to be.’
‘You’d better not trap me,’ he warned her. ‘They said you might.’
‘Who did?’ This seemed unlikely since he was not allowed to fraternize with other prisoners. Had the guards warned him about her?
‘The solicitors. I have to tell them when someone comes in to see me. It’s a rule. They’re worried about you, though, because you’re a reporter who works for one of them tobloids.’
‘Tobloids?’ She almost laughed at that but didn’t think he would take kindly to it. ‘You don’t have to worry about that. I don’t work for a tabloid. I don’t actually work for anyone at the moment. I’m just trying to discover the truth.’
‘Don’t you? They said that you did.’
‘Well, I don’t and I don’t know where they got that idea from, Simon. I am a journalist, like my father, but I’ll be honest – I’m an unemployed one currently.’
‘Your dad said that he had an open mind.’ He leaned forward slightly and the prison guard unfolded his arms as if readying himself to intervene. Was Simon going to lurch at her? How long had it been since he had seen a woman close up like this? She hadn’t thought about that until now. Would her presence be enough to make him dangerous again after all these years? Instead he asked her, ‘Do you have an open mind?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘And do you think I killed that lady?’
‘Well, I don’t know about that –’ he sat straight then and it was his turn to fold his arms in a defensive gesture that indicated his displeasure – ‘but my father thought you were innocent and that’s a good start in my view.’
He uncrossed his arms and seemed to relax a little. ‘He did and he is right. I did not kill that lady or the other one.’
‘“That lady” meaning Rose,’ she confirmed, ‘and “the other one” meaning Katherine?’
‘Yes. I never even met Katherine, so how could I have killed her?’
‘That’s a very good point, Simon. In fact, I was hoping you could help me to fill in a few gaps in the story today.’
‘It’s not a story,’ he told her firmly. ‘It’s my life. It’s why I am stuck in here for ever.’
‘I’m sorry, Simon, I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just a word journalists sometimes use.’
‘You have to be careful with words,’ he told her. ‘Words are important.’
She could tell he firmly believed that. ‘Are words the reason you’re in here, Simon?’
He nodded at that. ‘The police tricked me. They said I could go home if I signed under my words. Only they weren’t my words. They were made-up words. It didn’t matter, though.’
‘You retracted your confession. You took it back.’
‘Made no difference. The teacher still let the police tell the jury about it.’ He was confused again and she realized he meant the judge. ‘They didn’t believe me. They believed the police. Everyone always believes the police.’
He started on a long explanation of being questioned by them and Rebecca was fascinated to learn of the many ways in which the police had exerted pressure on Simon to confess to a crime he most likely had not committed. He told her about being arrested shortly after Katherine’s body was found and how he was accused of luring her to meet him somehow or following her into the woods, then brutally murdering her there, probably because she had worked out that he must be the killer. Then he said something very interesting indeed. ‘I know she wanted to talk to me.’
‘Katherine Prentiss wanted to talk to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about?’
‘I don’t know, but she phoned my mam, then put a note through the door of our house. My mam told me about it. I wasn’t going to call her but then someone killed her and I was arrested. The police said the note was evidence but I don’t see how when I never went to see her.’
It was evidence that Katherine had good cause to talk to you about something, thought Rebecca, but what? If the police thought she had evidence that Simon killed Rose, then that might give him a motive for also killing Katherine. That note must have been a pretty big piece of their case against him, yet Simon had not been charged with Katherine’s murder, because it was too flimsy. He went to jail for one killing, not two.
They talked for almost an hour and during the visit Simon confirmed his account of the state of the woman he had found in the churchyard. ‘There was blood all over her,’ he said, ‘that’s why I didn’t know who it was. I never realized it was the sandwich lady.’
It seemed Simon did not even know her name at the time; he just thought of her as the sandwich lady. Surely if he was as obsessed with her as the police had surmised, then he would at least know the name of the woman he was destined to kill?
‘Wrap it up now, please,’ said the prison officer as the hour mark approached, and Rebecca realized her time with Simon had flown by. It had been a useful exercise, but he had only confirmed much of what she already knew. It seemed he would not provide her with a significant breakthrough. Like her father before her, she had already concluded that Simon Kibbs most likely did not kill either Rose or Katherine, but she was no closer to identifying the real killer. Rebecca acknowledged the prison officer’s warning and began to put her pen and pad into her bag when she remembered something. It was then that she belatedly recalled her father’s note to himself. Ask him what he really saw.
‘There was one last thing I wanted to ask you, Simon. I understand you saw a man in the churchyard that day around the time you discovered the body of Rose McIntyre?’
Simon looked down at the table then. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about that ever,’ he said. ‘My solicitors don’t like it.’
‘Because they don’t believe you?’
‘Nobody believes me.’
‘Come on, let’s be having you.’ The prison officer’s tone was impatient and his voice louder.
‘Just one more minute,’ she urged him. ‘Please.’
He didn’t answer, just looked a little pained, but she took this as permission to finish her line of questioning before Simon was spirited away, back to solitary confinement once more.
She turned back to Simon. ‘Was it because you said you had seen a detective? Was that why nobody believed you?’
His voice was barely a whisper. ‘Yes.’
‘I see. Well, I believe you.’
His head came up and he looked her right in the eye then. ‘You do?’
‘Yes, I do. I don’t think you would say something like that if it wasn’t true.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ he assured her.
She was trying to visualize the situation, to put herself in the shoes of this young man who had been little more than a boy really, a quiet, simple soul who sometimes got muddled and confused things, and yet seemed so sure about what he had seen that day in the churchyard.
‘I just have one question for you, Simon. How did you know it was a detective?’ He seemed torn, as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether he should confide in her or not. She wanted to say What harm can it do you, Simon? You’re already stuck in here for life. But instead she kept silent and hoped that would persuade him to say something before the prison officer lost his patience.
Rebecca wondered if Simon might claim that it was DI Hall or one of his colleagues, whose involvement in the case Hall had helped cover up by telling Simon not to mention it again. Had a detective been involved when Simon first got into trouble for touching that young girl? Was that how he knew the man? Maybe, instead, he somehow mistook Jason for a detective or even Graham. They both went around town asking questions. If he could confuse a judge with a teacher, then perhaps he didn’t know the difference between a reporter and a detective.
‘I could tell he was,’ he said firmly.
‘Yes, but how could you tell the man was a detective, Simon, if you didn’t know him?’
‘Seriously now, that is the end of the interview.’ The intervention from the prison officer was not unexpected but the timing was awful.
Rebecca had to hear Simon out. ‘Please,’ she urged the man, ‘just let him answer this last question.’
She was convinced he was about to say no but perhaps her imploring tone showed how important this was to her because instead he said, ‘Hurry it up, Simon.’
Simon was accustomed to doing what prison officers told him to and he blurted out, ‘Because of his uniform. He was walking away from me but I could see he wore a uniform.’
Rebecca blinked at Simon then and stared at him, as she tried to digest the significance of what he had just said. She felt a tingling sensation, a physical manifestation of something that was part shock and part excitement. When Rebecca spoke, she did so in a calm and measured manner that was directly at odds with her feelings. ‘Simon, did you say that this detective was wearing a uniform? A police uniform?’
‘Yes,’ he said simply.
‘But detectives don’t wear uniforms,’ she told him.
‘This one did.’
Expecting to be cut off by the prison officer at any second, Rebecca quietly asked, ‘Simon, what does a detective do?’
He looked at her as if this was a stupid question. ‘Solves crimes, catches bad people.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘They do.’ Then she asked, ‘Simon, what is the difference between a detective and a policeman?’
Again, he looked at her as if she was crazy. ‘There is no difference.’
‘So when you say you saw a detective that day, you mean you saw a policeman?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s the same thing.’
42
Rebecca signed herself out of the prison, left in a hurry and swung her bag over her shoulder as she was striding out towards the car park. Her mobile phone was already in her hand and she turned it on as she walked.
Once she was back in her car, Rebecca reached for her keys so she could start the engine but her phone immediately rang with a message. She heard a familiar voice. ‘Hi, Rebecca, it’s Dominic. I just wondered how things went today.’ He sounded like he was trying to be light and breezy. ‘I heard you went in to see Simon Kibbs.’
