‘No. Arc you interviewing Frank Baine today?’
‘He’s being interviewed this afternoon. And some of the others, too. Eddie and Graham Kemp.’
‘The Kemps?’
‘Yes.’
‘Eddie Kemp never tells the truth about anything.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Cooper. ‘Get in the car, and we’ll give it a try.’
He leaned his weight on the boot of the Vauxhall, bracing himself to get a good grip on the road surface. Lawrence started the car and let off the handbrake. At first, it seemed as though the wheels weren’t going to get any purchase, but then the offside rear wheel found a bit of clear road surface, and a second later the Vauxhall lurched forward out of the mud. Cooper lost his footing and fell on to his knee behind the back bumper. Lawrence drove the car a few feet on to the road and stopped.
‘Thanks!’he called.
Cooper got up. Beating the snow off his gloves, he began to walk past the Vauxhall towards his own car. He stopped at Lawrence’s open window. ‘Before you go any further, I suggest you clear your windscreen properly,’ he said. ‘And scrape the snow off your headlights. Otherwise, if you run into my colleagues from Traffic, they’ll book you.’
‘I’ll do that,’ said Lawrence.
Cooper nodded, brushed off some more snow, and got into the Toyota. As he drove off, he looked into his rearvicw mirror. He could see Lawrence Daley waving goodbye.
The Ministry of Defence Police had taken their turn at interviewing Frank Baine on suspicion that he was the main contact for the servicemen the RAF Police had been keeping under surveillance. Diane Fry could see that Baine was certainly a man with a lot of contacts, and very little evidence of income from journalism. According to Lawrence Dalcy, Baine had also been running the website and the internet bulletin board.
A case against him for the murder of Nick Easton was going to
381
be more difficult to construct. They had found no weapon, and they had not keen able to show that Eddie Kcmp’s car had been used to convey Easton’s body to the Snake Pass. Besides, there was evidence that Eddie Kemp had been involved in the assault on the two youths near Underbank on Monday night — he was recognizable on the CCTV footage.
Fry shook her head in exasperation. The two young drug dealers were refusing to talk to the police on principle. But enquiries around Underbank had established that residents were well aware of vigilante groups who had taken it into their own hands to deter the drug gangs from the Devonshire Estate from moving in. Even the old man, Walter Rowland, had told an officer that there were people far more likely to recover his stolen property than the police. Sadly, he was almost certainly right.
The Kemp brothers seemed to have built themselves quite a reputation around Underbank. They were unlucky that the old couple who had identified Eddie that night had not been told whose side he was on.
She looked at the bayonet that had been used to attack Ben Cooper. She was anxious for her own opportunity to question Frank Baine and she was hopeful the forensic laboratory would give her a match from the bayonet to Baine’s DNA. That would clear up the assault on a police officer, at least. Meanwhile, she had both the Kemp brothers. And Eddie Kemp had some questions to answer about the death of Marie Tennent.
It proved to be a long afternoon before Frv got Eddie Kemp on to the subject she most wanted to know about.
‘The baby/ she said. ‘Marie’s baby.’
‘It wasn’t mine,’ said Kemp. ‘She told me the baby wasn’t mine.’
‘How did you feel about that, Mr Kemp?’
‘Feel?’
‘Were you angry with her?’
Though they had given him the required breaks from questioning, Kemp was starting to look tired. He was still trying to act relaxed, completely unconcerned, like a man with nothing to fear. But Fry thought she could see the weariness in his eyes, the first sign that he was being worn down.
382
‘Were you angry, Mr Kcmp?’
‘It didn’t matter to me.’
‘No. Let’s think about that. If I remember rightly, a pregnancy takes nine months. If that baby wasn’t yours, it meant Marie hat! been seeing someone else while you were still living with her.’
‘So?’
‘So I think you might have been angry about that, said Fry. ‘I think you might have lost your temper.’
‘Well, any bloke might have done, in that situation.’
‘So you hit her, did you?’
Kemp grimaced with irritation. ‘You seem to have me pegged as the violent type. I don’t know why.’
‘How many times did you hit her?’ asked Fry patiently.
‘Look, it was a bit of a blur, to be honest.’
‘Once? Twice? More than twice?’
“I don’t recall.’
‘Where did you hit her? On the face, on the body, or where?’
‘On the body, I suppose.’
‘Did you hit her in the face, too?’
‘It I did, it was an accident.’
