She takes a deep breath and holds it for a moment. ‘Is he going to hate me?’
‘What he did was wrong - you have nothing to be ashamed of.’
DS Abbott arrives with a folder of photographs. I spread them on the table - images of caravan parks and aerial photographs of the Somerset and Cornish coastline. I take the best of the prints and put them on a white board. Sienna sits watching me.
‘Remember what we said?’
She nods.
‘This is just like being an actress. You’re my leading lady.’
‘I know.’
‘Don’t be scared.’
‘I’m not.’
I look into her eyes.
‘I don’t hate him, you know. Even if he doesn’t love me any more.’
Along the corridor, Ronnie Cray leaves the interview room. Gordon Ellis is led back to a holding cell - his lawyer at his side, whispering instructions.
Sienna rubs a lock of hair between her forefinger and thumb. Gordon has reached the door.
‘So from the caravan you could see a fairground?’
‘Yes,’ says Sienna.
‘What could you see?’
‘The top of a merry-go-round with lots of coloured lights . . . and I could hear music and people laughing.’
‘What else?’
‘The sea.’
‘Could you see the beach?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you recognise it again?’
‘Sure.’
Sienna is standing at a whiteboard, pointing to a photograph.
Gordon Ellis has stopped in the passageway, waiting for Roy to unlock the next door. He hears Sienna’s voice and turns, taking in the maps and photographs. His pale eyes swim with loathing. Roy nudges him forward. The door closes.
Sienna takes a deep breath.
‘Did I do OK?’
‘You were a star.’
48
‘His name is Carl Guilfoyle,’ says Cray, staring from her window, watching people dodge through the rain. ‘He’s originally from Belfast, although he’s spent half his life in the States - including a dozen years in prison in Arizona for attempted murder.’
A bus rumbles by, sending up a flurry of spray.
‘We pulled his prints from the room at the Royal Hotel. He tried to wipe it clean, but we got two partials from the suitcase.’
She opens a folder on her desk. It contains a handful of photographs of Carl Guilfoyle - most of them police mugshots. The earliest, taken in his teens, shows him clear-skinned, with dark hair and a crooked mouth.
‘When was this taken?’
‘He was seventeen. He glassed a guy in a bar-fight. When the Arizona police picked him up he had a fake ID. A judge remanded him to an adult prison. That night one of the older cons tried to take advantage of a young white Irish boy in the shower block. Big mistake. They found the con in a shower stall choking on his own blood. Swallowed his tongue. To be more exact - they found it in his stomach.’
‘What happened to Guilfoyle?’
‘He got twelve years for the glassing.’
‘He was a juvenile.’
‘Doesn’t make much difference in the States.’
I study each of the photographs. It’s like watching a Hollywood make-up artist transform an actor, putting on a prosthetic mask, altering their age and features. Only Guilfoyle’s eyes have stayed the same, rimmed with a quivering energy. I remember how he looked at Sienna’s photograph, committing her face, her hair, her budding body to memory. I could smell his aftershave and something else, crawling beneath.
‘Ever heard of the Aryan Brotherhood?’
‘The white prison gang.’
‘They make up one per cent of the US prison population and they commit nearly a quarter of the prison murders. That’s where Guilfoyle got his tattoos - the teardrops are supposed to signify a kill.’
‘Who?’
‘A black guy called Walter Baylor. Carl shanked him in a meal queue in front of a hundred and forty-seven witnesses - and nobody saw a thing. That’s the thing with the Brotherhood. People seem to suffer collective amnesia and mass blindness whenever anything happens inside.’
‘Are there any links between Guilfoyle and the men on trial?’
‘The Aryan Brotherhood has been associated with Combat 18, the armed wing of a British neo-Nazi organisation called Blood and Honour. The eighteen comes from the first and eighth letters of the alphabet: Adolf Hitler’s initials. C18 was formed in the early nineties as a breakaway group from the BNP after certain members became disillusioned with the party going soft on the armed struggle and focusing instead on politics.
‘This breakaway group launched a string of attacks on immigrants and ethnic minorities, but most of the ringleaders were rounded up a decade ago during an undercover operation by Scotland Yard and MI5. Some of them were serving British soldiers.
‘Tony Scott was a member of Combat 18. When it was broken up in the nineties it fractured into splinter groups, but managed to survive, linking itself with racist organisations in Russia, Germany and America.’
‘Groups like the Aryan Brotherhood?’
‘Exactly. They also set up chapters in cities like Belfast where some of the former Loyalist paramilitaries were quite sympathetic to the racist agenda.’
‘Brennan grew up in Belfast.’
‘He and Guilfoyle lived only a few streets from each other.’
Cray closes the folder and locks it in her filing cabinet.
‘So they could have known each other?’
‘MI5 has run a check on Guilfoyle. He and Brennan were on the streets of Belfast at roughly the same time, but they were never arrested together or linked.’
A WPC knocks on the office door and hands Cray a DVD. Putting the disk into a machine, The DCI presses a remote and a TV screen illuminates. She hits fast forward. Stop. Play.
‘This was taken outside Annie Robinson’s place.’
The time code on screen says 15.24.07. The blurred figure in the frame is wearing a hooded sweatshirt or a parka, walking away from the camera. It could be a man or a woman. Carrying something.
Thirty yards along the road, the person climbs three steps and presses a buzzer. What button? Lower half. Nothing clearer. The door unlocks. Someone must have released it.
Cray presses fast-forward again. The time code says 15.26.02. The same person on the street again, head bowed, this time walking towards the camera. I can only see the hood and empty hands.
‘That’s what I hate about the morons who install security cameras,’ says Cray. ‘They get the angles all wrong. This is next to useless.’
Rewinding, she runs through the footage again. A left hand reaches out for the buzzer. The right hand holds a
