The Disciple

‘I don’t know anyone.’

‘Well, would anyone you don’t know remember you?’ asked Grant.

‘Unlikely. I was camping wild. The whole idea is to keep away from civilisation.’

‘Isn’t that illegal?’ asked Grant.

‘Sometimes,’ nodded Brook.

‘So you have no alibi,’ concluded Hudson.

‘If I thought I needed one, Joshua, I would have slapped a policeman in the face with my passport and stuck my birth certificate in his mouth.’

Both Hudson and Grant made sure to give Brook an appreciative chuckle, but Hudson knew that such flattery was unlikely to make him more forthcoming.

‘Is there anything else?’

Hudson ground his teeth. After a few seconds he said, ‘Funny, you’re not asking for many details about the murder. I find that odd for a police officer. You’ve asked no questions about how a fit, forty-three-year-old male was forcibly drowned.’

Brook looked at Hudson and Grant in turn. ‘I don’t care about Tony Harvey-Ellis or how he died. I’m just pleased he’s dead after the way he preyed on my daughter and betrayed my ex-wife.’

‘You think of their welfare no matter how much they hate you.’

‘I guess Terri doesn’t hate me,’ said Brook. ‘But she loves her mum more. Amy probably hates me because I destroyed her first marriage and tried to do the same to her second. The fact that I was right to do so on both occasions is a detail as far as she’s concerned.’

‘And, if it were necessary, would you consent to giving us a DNA sample? In case we need to rule you out of our inquiries.’

Brook pursed his lips in a show of concentration, looking back at Grant. ‘No. I don’t think I would.’

‘Really? Why not?’ ventured Hudson.

Brook smiled back at him, unblinking. Grant and Hudson had just about given up on an answer when Brook said, ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Officers are encouraged to volunteer dibs and dabs for the database,’ said Grant. ‘It’s compulsory for new recruits.’

‘Good for them,’ replied Brook. ‘Let me know when it becomes compulsory for me.’

Hudson decided he was going to have to play his one remaining card. ‘Have you ever heard of Twilight Sleep, Damen?’

Brook’s eyes widened and his mouth parted slightly. ‘What?’

‘Now I don’t know too much about Vitmanstein,’ said Sheriff Dupree, holding back a stray branch so the agents could pass unhindered, ‘but this here ground is a clearing, wouldn’t you say?’

‘No doubt,’ nodded Drexler as he and McQuarry emerged from the undergrowth and approached the line of motor homes sitting alongside the twenty-foot rock wall that made up one side of a natural basin. ‘This is a clearing.’ He mopped his brow. The air in this bowl was oppressive, the breeze apparently unable to penetrate the dense foliage surrounding the amphitheatre on three sides.

The vehicles had been carefully parked against the wall of rock and were in various states of decay, the oldest on the far left, all the way to the newest on the right. Some were physically intact and others had clearly been in some kind of collision, whether it was just a dent or, in the case of the newest vehicle — a yellow VW camper with California plates — a hefty crash.

‘The yellow camper you see there belonged to the Bailey family,’ said Dupree. ‘The last family to disappear.’

‘Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona.’ McQuarry muttered, as she examined the motor homes’ plates. ‘Guess we’re on board, Mike.’ She approached the VW camper and tried the door handle. It opened and Drexler and Dupree saw her reach inside briefly. She straightened up again holding a rag doll with yellow string for hair, then turned to her partner, a sombre look on her face. She looked at the ground, surveying the well-dug soil. ‘Not a lot of vegetation growing in the ground, is there?’

Drexler followed her eyes down, looking at his own feet. ‘Jesus,’ he breathed when the penny dropped.

‘You think …?’ Dupree took a few seconds’ pause as he and the two agents began to step backwards, away from the vehicles to the edge of the clearing, as though walking on hot coals.

Chapter Seven

Grant stirred the remains of her starter and pushed it away. A waiter made to remove it so she pulled it back towards her. When Hudson returned from the toilet and sat back down, she took a sip of her sparkling water.

‘Have a lager, darlin’. We’re on exes, remember. Make the most of it.’

‘I’m not an MP, guv. Water’s fine.’

Hudson shrugged and ordered another Kingfisher. ‘At least give the case a break.’

Laura Grant smiled like a patient mother with an errant child. ‘He’s still our guy, guv, I’m telling you. He didn’t turn a hair when you said it was murder — all that hooey about “what brings you up from Bromley”. He knew from minute one why we were here and where we were from — which means he knew Harvey-Ellis was dead when he walked in.’

Hudson nibbled on his roti bread, nodding at Grant’s starter. She shrugged her assent and Hudson attacked her mushroom puri.

‘Sure he knew. But it doesn’t mean anything. There’s the internet. Maybe Terri or Mrs H phoned him…’

‘He said he hadn’t spoken to them for a long time.’

‘He may have lied. But it’s not enough.’

‘He’s got no alibi.’

‘That doesn’t put him in Brighton, Laura. We’d need a lot more to put pressure on a detective inspector. Assuming we wanted to…’

‘Assuming we wanted to? Why wouldn’t we?’

‘You heard him, luv. Harvey-Ellis was a sex offender — a paedo, strictly speaking. Good riddance, most people would say. We say it every day about the scum we’re forced to deal with.’

Grant sighed. ‘I suppose. It’s just he was so damned cocky about it. It’s not normal.’

Hudson raised an eyebrow. ‘So you didn’t like him. Or don’t you like the fact that you did like him?’

Grant looked up from picking poppadom crumbs off the linen tablecloth. Her pretty face became surly for a moment, then eased. ‘I can’t deny Brook’s got … charisma.’ Hudson smiled. ‘But do I find him attractive? Er, not likely. He’s almost as old as you, guv.’

Hudson’s smile thinned. ‘Thanks a bundle.’ He looked around at the decor of the smart Indian restaurant just down the road from the Midland Hotel. ‘Nice curry house, this. Good find, Laura. The food’s great.’ Hudson folded the final forkload of mushroom into his mouth and sat back with a sigh.

‘You know, there is one thing in his favour,’ said Grant.

Hudson nodded, trying to clear his mouth to speak. ‘Yeah. Twilight Sleep. That really threw him.’

‘It appeared to throw him, guv. He could still have been faking it.’

‘But why would he? Someone using The Reaper’s MO — it’s a big deal to Brook.’

‘Maybe he was just surprised that we got onto it so quickly.’

‘You’re not going to let this go, are you, luv?’

Grant paused, tipping the rest of her bottle of sparkling water into her glass. ‘You know guv, as a woman I probably shouldn’t say this, but I know about rape, I’ve worked cases, I’ve seen…’ a moment of remembrance darkened her countenance for a second ‘…I’ve seen the victims and what it does to them. And, honestly, I don’t give a shit about the affair with Terri. Fifteen or not, Harvey-Ellis did not coerce that girl into bed. Okay, he may have seduced a silly little girl whose self-importance got the better of her judgement, but he didn’t hold her down and she wasn’t drugged. I’ll admit he deserved a tug for it but as far as I’m concerned, he didn’t deserve to die. And if people think they can play God and take other people’s lives because