didn’t return. It might be hard to find another one this late of an evening, but there should be someone here by morning, even on a weekend.’
The brief nodded again as the detectives ended the interview and rose to leave. Grey wondered if Isobel would even still be here by the time the support officer arrived, his need for answers only equalled by his conviction that they may never be forthcoming.
‘This is a mess, Grey,’ said Rose, having listened in on the interview. ‘Isobel’s played her last card — there’ll be nothing more achieved this evening.’ He paused, exasperated, ‘You can’t even tell me what you think the pair of them were involved in! Besides, I’ve got Aubrey’s lawyer on my back. We can’t keep them in beyond tomorrow anyway, so I’m letting them leave.’
Grey knew his time had run out.
‘You’ve found Thomas, and Isobel — you’ve done well. Who knows what she and Aubrey were up to that night, that’s their business. Now let it go, Grey. Get home and get some sleep, and we’ll see the Longs in the morning.’
Knowing he could leave Cori to make her own arrangements, and feeling he couldn’t go home now even though ordered to, Grey left the buzz of the office behind and retreated to his office to think:
To think of Thomas leading Stephen Carman a merry dance all across the services that night, evading a vicious hood whose stock-in-trade was finding people and hurting them. Good going, Tom.
Grey thought of Carman too, and of that still image of him haunched like an animal savouring its kill. But now Grey wondered if it didn’t instead show him in adrenalin withdrawal, shaking, terrified of what he had just done, both to his own life as well as to Thomas Long’s? Grey thought of the cool air coming into the tunnel through that newly opened window, and of how no one had seen Stephen Carman since those pictures were taken.
Then there were the Aubreys: Alexander in London, insulated from all that had been happening; and his father Anthony, sat — for now — in a police cell, a man who had known such highs and lows in life that he was able to stare ruin in the face and know that none of it mattered. He wouldn’t even care of this news getting out tomorrow, news of his being here helping the police with their enquiries into the suspicious death of one of his staff.
Grey thought finally of Tom’s parents. They would be asked to identify their son in the morning, and he would have to get some proper sleep before that. He would leave soon he decided, have someone drive him home.
There was a knock on the door, as a Constable called to tell him his witnesses were being released. Grey knew he ought to be there, but was in no rush to rise from his seat,
‘I’ll be right along,’ he said, soon dragging himself up and out to the corridor. Nearly midnight, he noticed as he saw the clock at the top of the stairs… as an arm grabbed him and pulled him into a side room,
‘Sir, I think we’ve struck gold.’
‘What?’
‘Or something, anyway. Though nothing like what we were expecting!’
Before him were Sergeant Smith and Sarah Cobb, herself returned to work after spending most of the day catching up on sleep.
‘You remember at the plant,’ spoke Cori quickly, ‘you thought about how there could have been truck drivers sleeping in their cabs that night at the services?’
His efforts to think back even those few hours were not meeting with great success, but Cori hurried on,
‘Well I asked Sarah to search to see if anything had come over the wires these last four days, on the National Computer, Interpol, Europol or anywhere, search keywords: lorry; driver; motorway; crime.’
‘And look what came up, sir…’ Sarah passed Grey a print out he barely had time to focus on before Cori summarised,
‘They found a body, sir. The French police, in the back of a truck come over from Dover — it hadn’t been checked on our side apparently…’
‘A body? But Thomas was found…’
‘The victim had been stripped and beaten around the head it sounds like, no immediate means of identification. But look at the details, sir: white, male, estimated mid-twenties, mousey blond hair, no distinguishing features…’
‘Stephen Carman?’
‘It could be, sir.’ Cori smiled the way only a police officer could at the discovery of a corpse.
‘Oh Lord,’ Grey raised his gaze, his head resting back against the doorframe. ‘What does this mean?’
‘That someone murdered him, sir?’ answered Sarah; but he had been asking himself, an inner dialogue developing, the Inspector working through the logic that Cori had had a head-start on.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘someone could almost certainly have wanted to murder him.’ He looked back down to fix his eyes on those of his Sergeant, their shared gaze confirming they were thinking along the same lines, each free to use the other to test their shared conclusions, she asking,
‘But not..? But surely not Aubrey and Isobel? They couldn’t have… could they?’
Grey’s look confirmed he thought they could.
‘But a senior citizen and a slip of a girl?’
‘That Aubrey’s a big bloke, and they each hated Carmen enough by the end.’
‘Well, that’s for sure. And so not his drug buddies? Not a feud?’
‘Nash never mentioned a fall out among the drugs ring, quite the opposite — weren’t they planning some big deal? And anyway, I think they’d be tidier than this. This is amateur hour.’ He opened the door, ‘Come on, we’ve got to tell Rose — or they’ll be out in a minute.’
The three of them left quickly, before Grey paused in the corridor, ‘But wait a moment, aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves? We don’t know it was Carman; and how sure are we the truck was even here that night?’
‘The truck had started from Sheffield on Tuesday morning,’ filled in Sarah as she and Cori cajoled him down the stairs. ‘It had stops all over Britain before it left for France. Now the Interpol report only had its list of drop-offs, not where it went in-between, but the last one of these was just north of here. There was only one driver, and the truck would have a tachograph — he would have had to have stopped somewhere that evening.’
‘So you’ve sent for more details?’
Sarah nodded.
‘And they didn’t find him till now?’
‘Oh no, the French found him yesterday morning, they’ve had the body for two days. It sounds like they haven’t known what to do with him, who he was, where he came from, even where to start looking. If you think about it…’
‘…find the right truck,’ Cori continued, ‘make sure he’s well hid, and there’s a good chance the driver wouldn’t have the first idea of where along the route their extra passenger was put on board.’
‘The notes read as though the body had been dragged right to the back of the trailer, so you wouldn’t see it just by opening the hatch and pulling out the first few loads.’
The three of them came through the double doors and out into the mess room. It was unusually busy for this time of night even for a police station, with patrols still leaving for the factory and support staff called back long after hours.
Just then along the far wall came Isobel Semple and Anthony Aubrey, solicitors and Constables shepherding them on their short walk to freedom. As they strolled toward the door — for as the briefs would have suggested, any rush would be unseemly — Aubrey looked up and caught the Inspector’s eye. What was that look, Grey wondered? Victory, resignation? Had the man ever thought this might end well? Grey wasn’t sure, but it changed as Aubrey saw the steely glint now facing back at him. Grey had him and both knew it,
‘In light of new evidence… ’ he whispered to Cori as she went to intercept the party, he himself preparing to go and give his boss the bad news,
‘They couldn’t have, could they?’ Grey murmured, his mind awhirr. ‘They couldn’t have brought him here to kill him?’
‘Well, we don’t know that yet, sir,’ said Sarah stood beside him.
‘I think I do,’ he answered, and turned for the stairs.
