Bound, p.17
Bound, page 17
‘Sheila, do you think you’re able to answer a few questions now?’ I asked. With my swollen, blocked nose and the facecloth partially covering my face, I sounded a bit like Daffy Duck. I put the cloth on the table.
She nodded and gave an almighty, chunky sniff that made my stomach turn.
‘Did you know that Jacob was out at Taieri Mouth?’
She shook her head.
‘But you’d been in contact?’
‘Yes. I knew he was safe, but not where.’ The word ‘safe’ seemed pretty redundant now. ‘If I didn’t know where he was, I wouldn’t have to lie to anyone who asked.’
‘What did he tell you about Gideon Powell?’
‘You mean about his death?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nothing.’ She gave another stomach-churning sniff. ‘I told him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He didn’t know Gid was dead. When I rang and told him, that was the first he knew of it. He was really, really upset and crying and stuff. Then after youse guys told me you thought my Jacob did it, and I told him that, he was fair shitting himself.’
‘He said he didn’t do it?’
‘Of course he didn’t do it. Gid was his mate, they’d been mates forever, they looked out for each other. Someone else got to Gid and did that – it wasn’t my Jacob.’
‘So where was he on the night Gideon Powell died – on Wednesday the thirteenth of April?’
She took on a dejected, almost resigned look. ‘I don’t know. He’d already buggered off because youse guys were trying to pin the Seacliff man’s murder on them. He packed up and left straight after he got back from the cop shop. Said he wasn’t going to hang around to get arrested for something he didn’t do. Like I said before, he never told me where any of his boltholes were. He was probably already out at Taieri Mouth, where you guys…’
The words were left unspoken, and she took a big drink from the white plastic cup of water on the table next to her, trying to get herself together. When she’d regained her composure she continued.
‘I did talk to him that night, and he was all normal. I think there was someone else there too. Yeah, there was, because I remember hearing the telly on in the background, there was that big boxing match on. He was there watching telly, and someone was there with him, because he talked to him. He wasn’t out killing anyone.’
‘Do you know who was there?’
‘No, I don’t. And I wish I did because then he could tell you, and you might believe him. It wasn’t my Jacob.’
‘The house we found him in out at Taieri Mouth, it belonged to someone called James Clarke. Do you know anyone by that name?’
‘Jimmy – must be Jimmy Clarke. He’s just a mate,’ Sheila said.
‘Is he one of Gideon and Jacob’s associates? Part of their operations?’
‘No. He’s outside. New, I think.’
‘But he let Jacob use his house? How well did Jacob know him? Did Gideon know he knew him?’ It was too many questions at once, and Sheila looked a little bewildered, but to her credit, she picked up on what I was getting at. I guessed you didn’t get to be the wife of a criminal kingpin without picking up a few wiles of your own.
‘If you’re saying that my Jacob was pulling the wool on Gid, then no way. Gid knew about Jimmy. Knew all about him. They were just testing the water, letting Jacob become friendly with him, keeping an eye out.’
It was a dog-eat-dog world. So Jimmy had got their attention enough that they were checking him out. Did Jimmy get too big for his boots? Or did Sandhurst decide he liked playing at Jimmy’s house and with Jimmy’s toys better than Powell’s and the two of them colluded to get rid of the big guy? But then I remembered what Sheila had just said about Jacob not having known Powell was dead, and about his having the wind up about being a suspect. People who had survived in the drug industry for as long as Jacob Sandhurst had did not fair crap themselves about anything. They could roll with any punch. So maybe he didn’t kill Powell after all and some other piece of vermin had taken care of it.
‘Tell me, Sheila. With Gideon and Jacob gone, who would be next in their organisation? Who would step up to take the reins?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I’m not going to talk about any of that stuff to youse. That was their business; I’m not going there. Enough is enough.’
‘But Sheila, you were just telling me that Jacob didn’t kill Gideon. If Jacob didn’t then we have to find out who did. That’s the only way we can clear Jacob’s name, isn’t it? Find out the identity of the real killer? We have to look at Gideon’s enemies, but we also have to look at people closer to him.’ The good old enemy within. ‘Give us a name.’
‘Are you serious? This could help clear Jacob?’
‘It might.’ Non-committal, but the best I could do.
She considered for a moment, then looked down at the desk and spoke quietly like she didn’t want anyone to overhear.
‘Mikey. Mikey Chadwick.’
That name rang a bell. And we just happened to have asked Jimmy Clarke about him the other day. The drug squad had been trying to figure out his exact place in the scheme of things and who he was aligned to. Well now we knew.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It gives us a good place to start looking.’
‘What about that other business?’ She leaned forward onto the table, imploring.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That other murder, the Seacliff one. Can you clear Jacob’s name of that?’
I sighed. It had been a hell of a day, and the last thing I needed was yet another woman putting the onus on me to absolve the sins of her man.
‘Look, Sheila. I know this is hard for you, and I am truly sorry for your loss today. But we have really good evidence – solid evidence that will stand up in a court of law – that says that Gideon Powell killed John Henderson and that Jacob was there too. We have their fingerprints, and we have DNA evidence that tells us they were at the scene of the crime. There is nothing we can do to change that.’
‘But can’t you see?’ she said. ‘Can’t you see he didn’t do it? He was with me, I swear he was. How can I prove that to you? Can’t you see that was why he was forced to do what he did today? Why he opened fire on the cops? You backed him into a corner. He didn’t have to do that, he didn’t have to die, but he couldn’t see any other way out. My Jacob didn’t kill either of those men, but no one would listen, no one would believe him.’
I looked into her eyes and thought about the way events had turned and tried to ignore the little feeling of disquiet in my belly.
55
My mind wasn’t being cooperative and kept swinging back to the rather pressing issues of new life and imminent death. In an attempt to drown out the head noise with other noise I’d plonked myself down in one of the interview rooms and was watching the original recorded interrogation of The Cockroach. DI Johns and Paul were doing the interviewing and were being persistent and repetitive, going back over what he’d said, trying to detect any change in his story, gaps, the unexplainable. Their quiet persistence was driving Sandhurst nuts; in fact he was vehemently denying having killed John Henderson.
‘Can’t you dumb fucks see? I’ve been stitched up. We both have been. There’s no fucking way we killed Henderson.’
‘The evidence doesn’t lie, Mr Sandhurst.’
‘Well it fucking well has this time, because I had nothing to do with it, I wasn’t even there. You got it wrong. I’ve been framed. In fact, I bet it was you guys.’ At which point he started pointing his fingers at the detectives. ‘You fuckers planted the evidence, didn’t you? Planted this crap to make it look like we did it. You been wanting to put us away for years. It’s a fucking stitch-up.’
Sandhurst seriously needed to expand his repertoire of expletives. Also, if he had any idea how often we heard those words – ‘framed’, ‘stitched up’ and ‘planted’ – he’d have thought of something else more original to say, or else he would have saved his breath. Unfortunately, he had the credibility of a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. He was such a repugnant and reprehensible excuse for a human being, with a string of priors longer than my arm, that he garnered as much sympathy from me as he did from the two detectives sitting across the table, hammering away at him. But, I did have to concede, he appeared a lot more sincere and convincing than most people who took the attack approach to defence. In fact, he was doing a good job of ‘pleading and desperate’, tempered with ‘defiant and obnoxious’. Quite a skill.
I thought of the voice coming over the phone out at Taieri Mouth, again accusing us of planting evidence, of framing him and Powell, of killing John Henderson, and then of framing him for the murder of Powell. A voice desperate enough to go out guns blazing, into a certain death sentence. Suicide by cop. Desperation because of guilt? Or desperation because of innocence and the realisation that there was no hope of justice?
My mind entertained the unspeakable for a moment. Powell denied it, Sandhurst denied it. Their wives provided their alibis. Their wives also, in their own dramatic ways, fought for their husbands’ innocence. What if they were telling the truth? Could they have been set up? I dismissed the thought pretty damn fast. It would have been impossible – the evidence was too strong. There was both fingerprint and DNA evidence linking them to the scene of John Henderson’s murder. The only witness to the murder hadn’t been able to make a positive identification, just a limited physical description because of the killers’ protective clothing and disguise. So what if someone managed to find two people of similar stature to Gideon Powell and Jacob Sandhurst to do the deed, and somehow managed to have the evidence to plant, as it were? You would have to have some pretty determined and clever enemies to pull that one off. But then, God only knew, Gideon Powell and Jacob Sandhurst had amassed quite a collection of enemies.
56
‘So what would you do?’
‘You’ll need to be a little more specific than that, I’m afraid,’ Maggie said. We were parked at home at our small circular dining-room table, trying to eat, with some semblance of decorum, the smoked salmon linguine Maggs had created for dinner. So far I wasn’t succeeding too well, and had the stain on the front of my shirt to prove it. At least it was her I was being piggy in front of, and not someone I was trying to impress. The dinner would have been washed down so much better with a good Riesling, but, due to a certain parasitic condition, I wasn’t allowed any, and Maggie was abstaining in sympathy.
‘If you’re referring to the “some crazed woman punched me today” thing, then yes, you have to press charges. No one can assault an officer and get away with it, especially when it was on the national news. What kind of message would that send?’
We’d watched the six o’clock news, me cringing with anticipation of what angle the media would have made of it. They didn’t disappoint and managed to make out that I had somehow provoked the attack, and of course they played up the distraught widow, with the police having just brutally and wrongfully killed her angelic, model-citizen husband who the big nasty police had framed for a murder he didn’t commit. My only consolation for enduring it was Maggie giving me a high five for what she referred to as the ‘wild witchy woman hold’ move.
‘As much as I hated to do it, yes, she was charged with assault, which I’m sure made her day. And no, I’m not that big a bleeding heart.’
‘Oh yes, you are,’ she said as she noisily slurped up a mouthful of noodles.
‘Classy.’
‘Thank you.’
I smiled. ‘No, I was thinking more of a conundrum that’s come up at work.’ I swirled the linguine around my fork but thought better of putting it in my mouth. I’d reached an elegant sufficiency, and, as my Gran would have put it, any more would have been a superfluity. So I played with it instead.
‘I take it you’re not referring to the pregnancy? You have told him, haven’t you?’
‘Well…’
‘You’re kidding me. You haven’t told him yet? Why not?’
‘I did try, but work got in the way, and then, with the whole shooting thing, I didn’t get the chance. In fact, I haven’t even seen Paul since this morning.’
‘Sam, you’ve known for days. What’s the issue?’
‘There isn’t an issue.’
She looked at me, suspicion curling the corners of her mouth. ‘You are going through with it, aren’t you? You are going to have this baby? You’re not going to deprive me of a goddaughter, are you?’
That was a bit of an assumption, even if it was correct.
‘Of course I am,’ I said. ‘And of course I wouldn’t deprive you.’ Although, to be honest, the alternative had crossed my mind. But somehow, especially with Dad being the way he was, it didn’t seem right. I thought about the other thing she said. ‘What makes you so sure it will be a girl?’
She just shrugged, and smiled that knowing smile of hers.
‘Paul will make a great dad. He’ll be fantastic, you know that, don’t you?’
I looked at Maggie, a spark of shock forming in my mind. I had to admit something to myself that I didn’t really like. In all of my thoughts so far on the new life I was carrying, I hadn’t actually thought of it in terms of Paul being a dad, in the broader sense. Biologically speaking, yes, and in terms of how that would affect me, yes, but not from his perspective – of him being a little person’s daddy. An image leapt into my mind of him tossing a giggling, tousle-haired little girl into the air, sheer joy sculpted into his face, and I realised with a gulp that she was right, he would be amazing. I felt a pang of guilt at how Sam-centric I’d been about all this. It wasn’t all about me. With that realisation I felt a big funk descend upon me and my shoulders sagged under the combined load of tiredness, emotional drain and painful self-revelation.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘whatever went through your head just then looks like it blew something. You all right?’
‘Not really, but I’ll get over it,’ I said.
‘Have you told your mum?’
Bless her, Maggie knew that would make me laugh, and I did, borderline hysterically. ‘Are you insane?’
‘According to our self-testing in my psych labs, yes,’ she said. ‘But you won’t hold that against me, will you?’ I shook my head. ‘So, what’s really bugging you, besides all that other minor stuff in your life?’
How did I put this into words?
‘You know this murder case I’m working on, the Seacliff one? And how we have good, solid evidence to put away two of the scummiest, most repugnant criminal individuals on the planet? The same people we think were responsible for Detective Reihana being killed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m having my doubts.’
‘Why? I thought you said the evidence was conclusive.’
‘That’s the thing, it is. We have solid fingerprint and DNA evidence that puts them at the scene; it’s cut and dried as far as everyone is concerned. And God only knows we’ve been trying to put these guys away for years, but…’
‘Why are you having doubts?’
‘It’s the women. Both the wives are the only alibis these guys have, and of course no one believes them. We all know that wives would say anything to help their husbands, especially if they know what’s good for them. But, you know something? I’m actually starting to believe them.’
‘This isn’t just another one of your idealistic attacks of too much faith in human nature?’
‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But it’s not just that. I heard him, Maggie, I heard that man today when he was holed up in the house out Taieri Beach, backed into a corner and still proclaiming his innocence, and it haunts me. He sounded desperate – more than desperate. He sounded … God, I don’t even know the word. Pleading? Resigned?’
‘Innocent?’
‘Innocent.’ That was the word. ‘And that’s the thing I can’t get my head around. These men were far from innocent; they were the biggest criminals this city had. They were responsible for providing the drugs that ruin so many lives and cause so many deaths. They ordered the beatings and killings of so many people, and only ever created mayhem and misery. They were despicable, wicked men, and here was our chance to put them inside and throw away the key, except we can’t even do that now, because they’re both dead. But we can lay all this at their feet – except that I think they’re innocent. In my heart, I don’t think they did this, and I don’t know what to do. Part of me thinks I should let it go, that they are vermin, scum, the meanest bastards in the world, and they got what they deserved. But then this other part of me thinks this isn’t right.’
There was a long pause before Maggie spoke.
‘But what part of you do you think you can live with, Sam?’ It was a simple question, asked quietly, but its power clarified everything. She knew it too.
‘But they will hate me for it.’
‘Who will?’
‘My colleagues, especially The Boss … oh God, and Smithy. Everyone.’
‘Why did you join the police, Sam?’
‘To save the world, fight for the wronged, bring justice for all.’
‘Justice for all?’
‘Yeah, for all.’ And that included vermin, scum and the meanest bastards in the world.
57
‘I don’t know why you’re even bringing this up, Shep. We’ve got the bastards.’ Smithy was looking none too pleased with my playing devil’s advocate. Paul was beside him, and judging by the look on Paul’s face, for the first time ever – miracles and wonders – the two of them were in total agreement.
‘I know, I know,’ I said, unaccustomed to the show of unity, ‘and the evidence is strong; but what I’m trying to say here, is okay, what if yes, the evidence is strong, but it is contrived? That someone has engineered all this. And it’s not like either of them are able to defend themselves, are they?’
‘But who would go to that kind of trouble? Because what you’re suggesting is something so fantastic, it’s impossible. Someone managed to orchestrate it so that two killers turned up who just happened to be of a similar build to Powell and Sandhurst, and not only did these mystery people commit the murder, but they then actually had the evidence to plant and incriminate with. How would they have been able to get hold of a pair of latex gloves with the fingerprints? And then manage to get them covered in gunshot residue and John Henderson’s blood? And how would they have got hold of hair to provide DNA?’
