Dead Guilty Page 6

  ‘If you’re coming to Majorca for a week,’ George continued, his gaze fixed on Maggie, ‘where’s your suitcase?’

  13

  ‘I mean, you must have your toothbrush stashed somewhere,’ George added, slowly looking Maggie up and down. ‘I can’t begin to imagine where though.’

  It wasn’t the first time in all her years as a FLO that a relative had made an inappropriately suggestive comment to Maggie, but it was the most blatant. But instead of putting George Pope in his place, she was lost for words and could feel herself blushing to her roots as he grinned at her.

  ‘You must be Maggie,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘Not as in Thatcher, I hope.’

  She was tempted to refuse the cheeky bastard’s greeting but thought it would appear rude to his dad. So she offered her hand but then had to pretend-cough to cover the noise she nearly uttered when the touch of his palm against hers sent a jolt right to her groin. She snatched her hand away, mortified.

  George threw her a bemused look.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘I’ve already checked in,’ she said, squaring her shoulders to get things back onto a professional footing.

  ‘That’s a shame. We could’ve asked to be seated together.’

  Before she could react, George swung his attention to his father.

  ‘We should check in too, Dad.’

  ‘I already have our boarding passes, we just need to go to the bag drop.’

  As Philip and George checked the computer printouts that were their passage onto the plane, Maggie stood uncomfortably beside them, unsure what to do or say. Every now and then George stole a look in her direction that made her feel even more flustered.

  ‘I probably should go and check where DCI Walker and the others are. If I don’t see you again here, we’ll catch up at the departure gate.’

  As she moved to leave, George shot her a smile that made her stomach curl then Philip put out a hand to stop her.

  ‘Before you go, has there been any progress on the email Declan was sent?’

  Maggie channelled Patricia and set her face into the most inscrutable expression she could manage.

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘That’s a pity. We were hoping something might come of it.’

  Maggie had to walk away then, knowing her front would slip in the face of Philip’s disappointment if she stayed any longer.

  Walker had ordered her not to say anything to the Popes until further investigation had been carried out. The email Declan forwarded on to them had given them a breakthrough, and a significant one at that. The sender was me@threedates.com – the same address used to email Lara Steadman.

  14

  Saturday

  Saros ranked as one of the nicest places Maggie had ever visited. It was early morning still, before eight, and she was ambling along the seafront to drink in the fresh sea air and the view before meeting Walker, Shah and Paulson for breakfast back at their hotel. The entire stretch of seafront, from the marina to the peninsula in the distance where the whitewashed blocks of Orquídea loomed imposingly over the sea, was entirely paved over and the absence of vehicles only added to the resort’s charm. The place was teeming with families – the children were almost entirely preschool age, as there was still a month to go before the end of term back home – and Maggie could see the attraction: with no cars to worry about, weary parents could watch their children play in the sand in their eye-line while they took respite under the awning of a nearby cafe or restaurant.

  Saros felt like the safest place imaginable, but Katy’s murder had shown everyone otherwise. Walking along now, feeling the already hot sun on her face – when they landed yesterday it had been thirty-one degrees and today was predicted to be even hotter – and seeing families begin to stake out their places on the very same beach from where Katy vanished, Maggie struggled to equate such a beautiful setting with such a horrendous crime.

  Realizing it was nearly time for her to meet the others, she doubled back. The hotel where the Operation Pivot team was staying had been chosen for its no-frills reputation: the entrance was via a door sandwiched between a Spar supermarket and a cafe. There was no pool, no exclusive section of beach for patrons as provided by other hotels along the front, and only a tiny courtyard bar tucked away at the rear of the hotel. That at least meant they could avoid prying eyes if there was time for a drink at the end of the day. The team, Walker included, was under strict orders not to be seen enjoying themselves: the last thing the Met needed was the public thinking they were sunning themselves on a taxpayer-funded freebie instead of working.

  By the time she reached her room – her claustrophobia made her walk the stairs rather than take the lift – Maggie was hot and sweaty. But there was no time to nip inside and change her shirt because on hearing her fiddling with the key card in the slot, Walker stuck his head out of his next-door room.

  ‘Ah, you’re up. Good. Change of plan – it’s a working breakfast on my balcony now.’

  Maggie followed him into his room, noting the reams of files and paperwork strewn across his double bed. He’d obviously been up early too, but hard at work.

  Shah and Paulson were already on the balcony, helping themselves to croissants from a plate piled high with them.

  ‘Morning,’ said Paulson, raising his croissant at her as though it was a wine glass. ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  She didn’t return the question. A few days in Paulson’s company had taught her that he could insert innuendos into any conversation on any topic. Walker found it hilarious, but it really grated on her – and Shah too, judging by the way he spent most of his time in Paulson’s company rolling his eyes – so she now took care not to say anything that he could spin into a line. Which meant she hardly said anything to him at all.

  Walker offered her a glass of orange juice poured from the jug on the table, which she gratefully accepted.

  ‘I thought we should have breakfast here and not in the restaurant downstairs because I want to get cracking on revisiting some of the witnesses who were interviewed first time round and obviously we need to be discreet. I don’t want Babs from Blackpool overhearing us and plastering it all over Twitter,’ Walker said.

  He sat down in the vacant seat.

  ‘First up, the emails to Lara Steadman and Declan Morris are untraceable as the sender used a proxy server to scramble the IP address. But a forensic linguistics expert has confirmed it’s the same writer. Apparently they can tell by the phrasing. Given the detail about Lara’s abduction and Katy’s termination, it’s safe to say the person who wrote them was either the killer or an accomplice in the murder.’

  Maggie immediately thought of Lara and the lucky escape she’d had.

  ‘Are you going to tell the Popes?’

  Walker shook his head. ‘No, not yet. I don’t trust what ma’am will do with the information. She’s blabbed too many times to the press. I want to sit on it, in case we need it as leverage further down the line.’

  ‘Boss, I did an internet search for the phrase “three dates” to see what came up, and it widely refers to the ideal number of dates a woman should go on before she has sex with a man if she wants their relationship to amount to anything,’ said Shah. ‘Apparently it was on an episode of Sex and the City and then became a thing.’

  Paulson turned to Maggie. ‘Why didn’t you know that?’

  She gave him a withering look and he had the decency to look embarrassed.

  ‘I didn’t find any organizations that go by the name “three dates” and the only company I found was a Libyan date producer based in Tripoli who’s got a page on Facebook,’ Shah continued. ‘So unless our sender has a taste for dried fruit, we can assume he thought up the address for himself. It’s the why I can’t work out.’

  ‘Let’s do a PNC and Interpol check to see if there are any other cases where the phrase “three dates” has cropped up,’ said Walker to Shah, who nodded.


  The DCI lifted a piece of paper from the tabletop with notes scribbled all over it in his handwriting. Then he peered over the top of it at Maggie.

  ‘I know you’ve done well to get up to date on the case file in the short time you’ve been with us, but I’ll just run through the details of these witnesses to make sure you’re up to speed. I need you to muck in with these two on interviews so we can cover as much ground as possible between now and our flight home on Friday.’

  ‘Of course, boss,’ she said.

  ‘Right, the first one I want us to review is an ex-pat named Terry Evans, who ten years ago owned a garden apartment in block three at Orquídea,’ said Walker. ‘The local police had him in for questioning pretty swiftly because they’d received numerous complaints against him over the years. Evans hated the revolving door of tourists staying at Orquídea, even though most of the apartments were already holiday lets when he bought his, so he got into the habit of nicking any kids’ inflatables left by the pool overnight and puncturing them with a knife. He’d also dump any rubbish left in the poolside bins outside apartment doors for guests to trip over in the morning, and would scream abuse at anyone he felt was making too much noise late at night.’

  ‘He sounds pleasant,’ said Maggie grimly.

  ‘It was Evans’s fondness for knives that made him a suspect, but like Declan Morris he also had an alibi for when Katy vanished from the beach – he was at a business meeting in Palma. The police did stick a tail on him during the week she was missing, just in case, but he stayed indoors the entire time and was alone apart from his solicitor coming and going.’

  Maggie was confused.

  ‘You mean Evans had a tail on him at his apartment and the killer still managed to waltz inside Orquídea with the body parts?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the thing,’ said Walker, wagging his finger at her. ‘Evans complained his privacy had been violated when his apartment was searched, so he booked himself into a hotel in Palma and instructed his solicitor to push for damages so his apartment could be deep cleaned. He was more bothered about it being messy than he was about being questioned.’

  ‘The man was a neat freak,’ Paulson chipped in. ‘Couldn’t abide people touching his stuff. Afterwards it was assumed the killer chose Orquídea to dump the body because Evans had kindly ensured the police’s focus was elsewhere.’

  ‘Evans could have been an accomplice and planned it that way with the killer to distract the police,’ Maggie pointed out.

  ‘Every possible angle was checked with Evans – phone records, emails, everything,’ said Shah. ‘There was nothing to suggest he’d been plotting to murder Katy or anyone else. There wasn’t even the tiniest coincidence linking him to her.’

  ‘It’s crazy no one saw her body being dumped,’ said Maggie. ‘I know June isn’t high season, but Orquídea still must’ve had a lot of guests staying.’

  ‘That’s the irony of Evans not being there when it happened,’ said Paulson. ‘He was such a busybody that had he been at home he might well have spotted something.’

  ‘The pond areas are also secluded from the apartment blocks by dense bushes and trees. It wouldn’t have been as difficult as you’d imagine to do it undetected,’ Walker added. ‘The killer could’ve driven a car through the gate with Katy in the boot and dumped her in minutes. There was no CCTV in the complex back then either.’

  ‘Did Evans move after his apartment was defiled?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘Actually, he stayed,’ said Walker. ‘The pond nearest his apartment is the one where they found her head.’

  15

  Walker let his comment settle uneasily over the team then consulted his list again.

  ‘Next on my list is Julien Ruiz, a Madrid-born postgrad who had strong family ties to Saros,’ said Walker. ‘In June 2009 he was here working as a waiter at a bar on the town square, which is where he met Katy. She and Patricia had gone out for dinner alone one evening at the end of their first week and stopped off for a final drink. Julien was their waiter. Patricia went back to the villa after one drink, but Katy stayed on because she’d got chatting to a young couple at the next table and discovered they lived in Penge, which is down the road from where the Popes lived in Crystal Palace. Katy told her mum she’d finish her drink with them then follow her home. Because she was only a couple of weeks away from turning eighteen, Patricia thought she was old enough to travel back alone in a taxi. She’d only had one alcoholic drink all evening, a cocktail her mum permitted her as a nightcap.’

  Maggie recalled reading the Penge couple’s statement when she’d gone through the case file back in London in the two days she had to prepare before flying out. ‘Are they the ones who flogged their story to a tabloid?’

  ‘Yes, that’s them,’ said Walker. ‘They claimed Katy had been coming on hot and heavy to Ruiz, that he’d reciprocated and that Katy said she planned to go home with him when his shift ended. The couple left the bar at one a.m., forty-five minutes after Patricia left, and said Katy’s last words to them were to ask if Spanish condoms were as safe as British ones.’

  Paulson chipped in again.

  ‘Ruiz said it was bollocks and that the couple had made it up to get a big fat cheque from a tabloid. He said Katy left ten minutes after they did, but he couldn’t prove it. Neither Philip, Patricia nor Declan heard her return because they were asleep.’

  ‘Surely Declan noticed she wasn’t in bed?’

  ‘Your parents must’ve been more liberal than Patricia Pope was,’ grinned Paulson. ‘Katy and Declan weren’t allowed to share a room. She and her mum used to have blazing rows about the relationship. The day before she disappeared, Katy was seen sobbing her heart out on the seafront because she and her mum had rowed again about Declan.’

  ‘The witness who comforted her is on the list of people I want us to revisit, but I’ll come back to them in a minute,’ said Walker. ‘So, Ruiz had a reputation for sleeping with anything in a skirt, but the police in Saros decided this was the one time he’d sent an attractive girl packing without so much as giving her a peck on the cheek and ruled him out.’

  ‘He did have an alibi though, boss,’ said Shah, who Maggie now recognized was the team’s voice of reason. ‘Ruiz was ruled out as a suspect in the murder because he boarded in a hostel with dozens of other restaurant and bar workers and his movements could be accounted for the entire time Katy was missing – he was either at work or at the hostel. One of those friends also said he remembered Ruiz coming back to the hostel, alone, not long after the bar shut.’

  ‘However,’ said Walker, shooting Shah a look, ‘there was a back room in the bar that he admitted to using with other conquests where he easily could’ve shagged Katy and then killed her. The place wasn’t checked for forensics and, had it been, traces of her might’ve been found there.’

  ‘He swore blind he never slept with her,’ said Shah in an aside to Maggie. ‘He said Katy had told him she was going to come back another evening with her boyfriend so he could try the cocktails too.’

  ‘The Spanish police might’ve cleared him of any involvement but as far as the public was concerned, it was his word against the couple from Penge and everyone believed them that he’d slept with Katy,’ said Paulson. ‘Then lots of other stories came out about him. Where’s that front page, boss? Maggie should see it.’

  ‘It’s on the bed.’

  Paulson disappeared inside the room.

  ‘Is he still in Saros, then?’ asked Maggie.

  Walker nodded. ‘He owns an apartment in the old town.’

  Paulson returned to the balcony holding a print. ‘Well, he was hardly going to return to the bosom of his family in Madrid after gems like this.’ He held up a photocopy of a tabloid front page from 2009 that was dominated by a picture of an attractive young man with his arms round two beaming women, one in her twenties, the other a couple of decades older, and the headline KATY’S ISLAND LOVER SLEPT WITH ME – AND MY MUM!

  He and Walker broke in
to laughter.

  ‘Ruiz’s family disowned him and told him he wasn’t welcome back in Madrid after this story and others came out,’ Shah addressed Maggie. ‘His parents were devout Catholics and were horrified by the media image of their son as a promiscuous philanderer.’

  ‘What do you hope to gain from re-interviewing him now, boss?’ she asked.

  ‘It won’t hurt to rattle his tree and see if he’s ready to confess to sleeping with Katy.’

  ‘Why does it matter now, boss? His alibi for the murder is solid,’ said Shah.

  Walker looked peeved for a moment.

  ‘I know it is, but we need to go back to London with something, otherwise the stopper is going back in the money box for Operation Pivot. The Met doesn’t have an infinite budget and what it has given us we’ve pretty much bled dry. So getting Ruiz to admit he did shag Katy and lied about it could be useful. The one thing Patricia Pope and I agree on is that the original investigation by the local police here was atrocious – clues were missed, evidence lost, forensics not carried out, witness statements not written up. You name it, they ballsed it up. It was a bloody shambles. So if we get Ruiz to change his statement, it strengthens the argument to keep Operation Pivot going to undo the mess the Spanish made in the first place.’

  Walker’s cheeks were flushed pink by the time he finished and it suddenly hit Maggie that this wasn’t just a professional endeavour for him – he cared deeply about keeping Operation Pivot going so they could finally nail Katy’s killer.

  ‘We hear you, boss,’ said Paulson. Maggie and Shah quickly nodded their support.

  Walker cleared his throat and composed himself.

  ‘Third and fourth on the list are two known sex offenders who both lived within two kilometres of Saros when Katy was abducted. Both had alibis that ruled them out of further involvement but, again, let’s assume the Spanish police weren’t that thorough in their checks. Neither man lives in the area still, but the people who provided the alibis do and I’ve got their current addresses, so I want you two,’ he nodded at Paulson and Shah, ‘to pay them a visit.’