13. The Potential

DI Rosen attends a progress meeting with the senior officers.

13

Daria had spent the last twenty minutes in a queue of stationary traffic. There had been an accident up ahead and the thought of getting out to see if she could assist had occurred to her, but plenty of blue lights had gone past. She was sure it was in hand.

The progress meeting with the senior officers was in twenty minutes and she was likely to be late, but she was finding it difficult to care as much as she might usually. She had her music and she had her chai latte. Better still, she had a little time alone.

Her attention wandered out the car window to the fume-blackened grass and bracken which bordered the A228; a bleak bit of road hewn straight through the countryside. A solitary oak stood in the middle of the field she was all but parked alongside. The ancient tree was something of a landmark. Vega had pointed it out to her once before, and had shown her the scar on its calloused bark where a bough had been torn off by the storm of ’87, or so he had said.

On the night of the hurricane her father had been in Tokyo on business and her mother’s medications had ensured that she slept through. Daria had watched the storm’s chaos with her sister, the pair of them sat at the window with their arms tight around each other, their toes scrunching the shag carpet as the wind ripped the climbing roses from the trellis outside: they had been certain that when morning broke there would be devastation. They had waited for the screaming winds to pluck the house apart brick by brick, and prepared to be sucked up into the sky and dashed on next-door’s patio. 

They had lived through it, of course. They had lost a few roof tiles and the lime tree in the garden. Daria remembered thinking how indecent it had looked with its tangled roots exposed, dripping dark earth into the crater it had left. Father had it chopped up and they’d planted a new tree, but it never took and so mother paved over that part of the garden and added a water feature; an alabaster girl with pert breasts and an urn on her shapely shoulder which was forever spilling onto the pebbles surrounding her. Daria loathed her and mourned the lime tree still.

The car ahead of her moved forward and Daria fell in behind it. Her attention drifted out the window again to the silvery froth of birch trees and the darkness of the pines beyond them. She was a city girl, but Vega would know what those woods were called. There were hundreds of woods like them around these parts, all with peculiar names.

She noticed now that daffodils were beginning to break through and the day was a few degrees warmer than the one before. Spring was inching in.

Then, and for the first time, Daria felt a soft fluttering in the cradle of her pelvis. She had looked it up online and the foetus would have eyelashes now. The ridges on its fingertips would have formed, meaning it had its own unique prints. It would be able to grip things.

Still, that didn’t qualify it as a person. At this moment it was just potential.  

Rosen pulled around the two crumpled cars that had delayed her and accelerated smoothly to keep pace with those in front.

 

Kent Police’s headquarters in Maidstone were vast and sprawling, set behind a low redbrick wall with large firs growing along its perimeter. The meeting would have started without her but she had only missed the first ten minutes and they were usually taken up with pleasantries and coffee, neither of which she was in the mood for today. Even her latte had sickened her. She signed in, snatched her security pass from the receptionist, and took the stairs three at a time. Rosen composed herself before rapping her knuckles on the door and stepping inside. 

‘I’m sorry, traffic was horrendous,’ she apologised as she took a seat at the long, glass table and unclipped her laptop bag. She glanced towards the silver-haired man sat across from her: Assistant Chief Commissioner Onil Mitra.

Rosen had had few dealings with Mitra previously, but he had a reputation as a reserved and pensive man. He rarely spoke and when he did each word was measured and purposeful. He didn’t say anything now, no word of greeting, but he smiled patiently.

Sat next to him and the neatly-dressed secretary who would keep the notes was DCS Bishop, supernaturally punctual. ‘Shall we make a start?’ Mitra suggested, tearing a sugar packet and tapping its contents into his cup. ‘DI Rosen, I’ve been told the death of Sam Stowe is not as it first appeared.’

‘No, not quite,’ she said, leafing through her notes. ‘The detectives who discovered the body -- DS Vega and DC Khan -- were of the initial opinion that Mr Stowe had been murdered, and that the culpable party or parties made efforts to disguise this as suicide. Since then, Dr Rooker has concluded that Mr Stowe was dead before he was shot.’

ACC Mitra, a man with thirty-five years’ experience, looked visibly surprised. The news had been a shock to Rosen and the team, too. He pressed his fingers thoughtfully to his lips. ‘This was discovered during post mortem?’

‘Dr Rooker hasn’t conducted the post mortem yet, it’s scheduled to take place tomorrow morning, but he was able to ascertain at the scene that Mr Stowe was deceased when the shot was fired.’

‘All right, continue.’

‘Despite the fact that no note was found, the presence of the papers arranged in his fishing hut makes us think that Mr Stowe deliberately took his own life. Toxicology results are pending, but someone using Mr Stowe’s credit card did purchase benzodiazepines online a week before his death.’

‘And have you any idea why someone would wish to shoot a dead man?’ Mitra asked, his brows still arched.

‘Not as yet, sir. The team are looking into the conditions attached to his life insurance policy; it’s possible that it would have been invalidated if he had had depressive periods before and not disclosed this to the insurers, but we haven’t been able to establish that yet.’

‘But in that instance we’d be looking at a beneficiary, so a family member?’

‘That’s something we’d have to consider, yes.’

Mitra scratched at his large, rounded nose as he processed this. Rosen found herself watching the fast moving clouds in the window behind him. She’d be returning to Dowding house in rain, she suspected. She could almost smell it in the recirculated office air. ‘All right,’ Mitra said after a moment. ‘And his son, Dean? Are you treating the two deaths as connected?’

‘No. They’re being investigated simultaneously, sir.’ It was Bishop who spoke up now, and while Rosen was trying to concentrate it was becoming difficult to focus.

The room felt as if it was tilting. She leant back in her uncomfortably upright chair and wished it had arms that she could steady herself with. She lay her palms flat on the table instead.

‘In the days following his death, someone was using Mr Stowe’s phone and pretending to be him in texts to his estranged wife, Jodie. It’s possible that whoever killed him sent the texts to delay discovery of Mr Stowe’s death,’ Bishop was saying when she tuned back in. ‘Another possibility is that Jodie herself sent the messages.’

‘Do you think that’s likely?’ Mitra asked them. Rosen felt a pang of guilt. She had failed to get a feel for the woman. She didn’t know anything about her.

‘DS Vega has spent more time with her than I have,’ she ventured at last. ‘I trust his instincts, and he seems to think she’s being truthful.’

Mitra turned back to Bishop. ‘And the boy, Dean? Where are we with that? I would have thought that he is the priority case.’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘What have you found out about the child?’

‘Dean-oh,’ Rosen began, putting emphasis on the last syllable as the other two men had missed it off, ‘wasn’t exactly a model student. His teachers said it was difficult to hold his attention and he could be disruptive in class, but he wasn’t a bad kid by the sounds of it. Not malicious, certainly. He had earlier been prescribed Ritalin but they suspect he was neglecting to take them. He was rumoured to be selling his medication to other students.’

‘He was expelled from his last school. Dean --’ Bishop caught the look Rosen flashed him and held up his hand apologetically. ‘Deano failed the eleven plus, so he didn’t attend the grammar that his older brother went to. The parents sent him to a private school, but there was an incident with a teacher’s car.’

Mitra looked intrigued. ‘What incident was that?’

‘He had clashed with the teacher over a bit of course work which Deano insisted he had done but the teacher lost, and so Deano borrowed his Lexus,’ Rosen said, trying hard to look staid but feeling her mouth begin to curl into a smile. ‘Although he returned the car, it had to be…valeted. They didn’t pursue criminal charges but after that Deano was asked to leave.’

Mitra tapped his pen against his teeth. ‘Have you managed to put together a timeline of his disappearance?’

‘We’re getting there. He was last seen outside the sports centre early Wednesday evening, waiting on the wall. His father was supposed to be picking him up. Obviously he never came. CCTV shows Deano making a call on his mobile before leaving on his bike.’

‘His bike?

‘A BMX,’ Bishop said. ‘It went everywhere with him, apparently. He’s got some videos of himself on YouTube.’

‘He was actually pretty good,’ Rosen smiled.

‘Do we know who he called?’

‘The phone company haven’t been able to tell us,’ Bishop said. ‘It was to a pay-as-you go mobile and there were no contact details for it saved on his handset; it was a number he must have memorised. He had called it several times. Deano’s phone goes dead some ten minutes later.’

‘We’re going to play the footage of him leaving the sports centre during the appeal,’ Rosen promised. ‘We’re hopeful that will prompt the memory of anyone who might have seen him.’

‘Very good,’ Mitra said. ‘And are you receiving enough support from the Priority Crime Team?’

Bishop nodded. ‘Yes, they’ve been helpful.’

Rosen could feel the meeting drawing to a natural close and hesitated before speaking up again. ‘There is one other thing,’ she said as Bishop drained his cup and began to pack up. He looked at her and then to his watch. Mitra was less hurried and regarded her with curiosity.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re aware of the similarities between Deano’s death and that of Tom Healy?’

‘I am, yes,’ Mitra said, lacing his fingers. ‘Enough similarities that we agreed it must be deliberate, but not necessarily connected. Unless there is any evidence that the original team might have missed something?’

‘Well that’s the thing; DS Vega was part of that original team, and he says he interviewed Deano’s brother, Reese, in connection to Tom.’

‘The team interviewed almost a hundred boys aged twelve to eighteen,’ Bishop said, his voice taut. ‘I led the team, DI Rosen. I remember every one of them.’

‘Yes, sir. I appreciate that, but Reese fled the property where his father was found dead. That’s fairly suspect behaviour.’

‘With a thousand alternative explanations,’ Bishop muttered. ‘DS Vega is a pretty decent detective but I think he might be barking up the wrong tree with this one. There was no connection established between Reese Stowe and Shane Johnson, the boy who very clearly murdered Tom. They were from completely different backgrounds.’

‘Then why was Reese interviewed in the first place?’ Rosen asked quietly.

‘Because his mother sold Reese’s old Playstation to Tom’s mother. Afterwards the boys would chat online, in some game or other. That was the extent of their interaction. DS Vega established that at the time.’

Mitra was quiet for a moment as he contemplated the situation. ‘I’m satisfied for now that we don’t need to re-examine the Healy case,’ he eventually said. ‘However, given Reese’s connection to both victims and his behaviour at the second crime scene, I believe we should be proactively trying to locate him. Is that all?’ he looked between the two, and Bishop resumed packing his papers away which was answer enough.

Rosen had one more thing to bring up: Carmichael’s complaint against Vega. She needed to escalate it to DCS Bishop, but it didn’t seem necessary to mention it in front of ACC Mitra. Or at least, that was how she justified her ensuing silence.

She followed Bishop out of the room. In the hall, at the top of the stairs, he caught her arm. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m not taking this seriously, the connections between Tom and Deano.’

‘I don’t think that, sir,’ Rosen said softly. ‘You’re right to be cautious.’

‘I just think it’s more likely to be some lone lunatic who was looking to recreate a well-publicised crime. Murder mentees, they call them. Are you familiar with the term?’

‘I am,’ Rosen said, trying hard to concentrate on the broken veins in Bishop’s gin-blossom nose because once again the building felt as if it was shifting on its foundations. She gripped the handrail tight as they headed down the stairs together. ‘Ted Bundy had his acolytes, didn’t he?’

‘Most killers with a degree of celebrity do. I think we’d be best placed focussing on the care-in-the-community lot. There must be some way we can pull internet search results, find out who’s taken an unhealthy interest in the original case…’

Rosen felt numb suddenly. Bishop’s voice was distant. She thought for a moment the stairwell was full of smoke until she realised it was her vision fogging. She stopped on the step. ‘I feel…’

Her knees buckled beneath her. She heard Bishop call her name as he snatched her by the arm and hauled her up before she could topple down the remaining stairs. She realised she was on her back looking up into Bishop’s concerned face as his noxious coffee breath broke over her.

Oh, f**k…

 

Author's Note

All constructive criticism gratefully received.

Reviews

[NoelHC]

Well, that cleared up one cliffhanger from last chapter, why Rosen was changing a medical appointment, and leaves me with another, "Who's the baby daddy?" Damn, Sarah! As to the remainder of the chapter, all in all, well done, I enjoyed it, and the little side trip into Rosen's past added some depth to her.
The only thing I noted:
the body " DS Vega and DC Khan " not sure why the quote marks around the names here.

[SLD Bailey]

The quotation marks were long dashes, but a quirk of WC is switching them I'm afraid! I try not to use dashes for that exact reason and usually I remember to edit. I'm' pleased that you enjoyed the chapter :) I liked taking a little detour with Rosen and leaving Vega to stew for a while! For a long time, she was intended to be the protagonist but as I'm a grumpy old man at heart, it become Vega's story.

[NoelHC]

Yes WC does tend to do some weird things with text. Grumpy old man, indeed!

[W.k.kortas]

The episode of the hurricane and the lime tree? That's just damn good writing, pure and simple.

[SLD Bailey]

Can't tell you how much that means to me, thank you Kortas :)