Neither do I, Sean thought to himself, neither do I. A door opened along the corridor and Khan put his head out.
‘Sean? I want you in here for a minute, I’ll do a swap.’
As they passed in the corridor, Khan muttered to him: ‘If I have to spend another minute in that room with that sanctimonious little shite, I might ring his neck.’
‘I’m not sure what that word means, sir, but I think I feel the same about Starkey.’
He was opening the door when Sandy Schofield came bustling down the corridor.
‘You got a Kamran Ahmed in there?’
Sean nodded.
‘This message just came. You may want to pass it on yourself.’
‘Thanks.’
She handed it over and disappeared back up the corridor.
In the second interview room, the smell of expensive cologne hit Sean immediately. Kamran Ahmed was wearing designer threads to match the fragrance. If they were genuine, Sean totted up at least six hundred quid, from shoes to collar.
‘As I said to your colleague,’ Kamran said, with a polite nod, ‘I really have nothing to say until my solicitor gets here.’
‘That would be your father’s solicitor?’ DS Simkins said, looking at her notes. ‘A Mr Sadiq?’
‘Yeah, that’s him.’
‘DS Simkins?’ Sean cleared his throat. ‘There’s a message.’
He handed the piece of paper to Dawn Simkins and as she read it, another rare smile forced her mouth up at the corners.
‘It says here that Mr Sadiq is unable to act on your behalf in this instance.’ She and Sean both watched as Kamran’s soft bottom lip hung open. ‘The message is from your father,’ Simkins continued. ‘He’s sorry, but that’s all he says. For the tape, I’m handing the message to Mr Ahmed to read for himself. Would you like us to contact the duty solicitor?’
Kamran Ahmed shook his head. He sat in silence for a moment and when he spoke, his voice was controlled.
‘I can look after myself. This is all a mistake. It’s Terry Starkey you should be talking to, not me. Starkey is a known criminal. This has nothing to do with me.’
‘But you know him?’
‘I’ve … I’ve met him.’
‘So do you know him well?’ DS Simkins said. ‘Are you friends?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘So why is he driving your car?’
‘I’ve no idea. He must have stolen it.’
Kamran rested his hands on the table. His calmness was almost soothing, but the veins on the backs of his hands stood up.
‘And you’ve reported it stolen, have you?’
‘I haven’t got round to it.’
Sean saw now why she was called ‘the Rottweiler’. Her interview technique was persistent, she wasn’t letting go. Like Rick, she was playing as if they had all the time in the world. He could have sat for hours watching, but the door opened and Khan came back in.
‘Denton? Can you sort out the tea run for DI Houghton and then come back here and do the same? It may be a long night.’
‘DCI Khan has entered the interview room and PC Denton has left.’
He was back to being the tea boy, just when it was getting interesting. Sean sighed. He knew this could go on for a long while, but wished he could be there when Starkey broke. He knocked on the door of the first room and asked Rick what he and his interviewee wanted to drink. Starkey asked for tea with two sugars, if it wasn’t too much bother. Sean thought he’d have to resist the urge to spit in it, but he kept his face set to neutral.
When he brought the drinks back, Rick was asking Starkey about gardening tools.
‘If we found a knife a bit like this one, whose prints do you think we’d find on it?’
‘No idea.’
‘No idea, or nobody’s prints?’
Starkey shrugged.
‘No comment.’
‘What would we find, Terry? Come on, we know you’re familiar with the tool shed at Halsworth Grange, about what came in and out of it. We know that Taheera Ahmed was killed with a knife that had never been used for gardening. Are you sure you didn’t help yourself to a fresh delivery when it arrived from the Garden Centre?’
‘What’s this got to do with me?’ Terry shouted. ‘I didn’t do the girl and you can’t say I did.’
There was a moment when no one spoke.
‘Who did you “do”, Terry? The young man, Mohammad?’ Rick said. ‘Or did you do the neat little warning cut on his younger cousin, Saleem? If not the girl, then who? They were all neat, sharp jobs, the work of someone who knows what he’s doing with a knife. Is that you, Terry? Or have you got your own apprentices now?’
‘Fuck off. I’m saying nowt. You’re trying to mess with my head. No comment.’
It was getting late and Rick decided to transfer Starkey to the cells. Khan wanted to keep Ahmed going for a bit longer. Sean met him in the corridor.
‘I just need one of them to say enough to tie it in with your recording,’ Khan said, ‘but at the moment, all we’ve got is one pack of lies against another. I don’t understand why Ahmed’s protecting Starkey, and until we get Lizzie’s DNA tests on Taheera, we haven’t got enough to prove anything.’
Sean stifled a yawn and Khan took the hint.
‘You’d better get off. You’ve had a long day.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘And take tomorrow off. We owe you that.’
‘OK,’ Sean said, but his heart sank, he wanted to be part of it, see it through to the end. Khan was waiting for a response. Sean forced a smile. ‘Thank you, sir.’
Nan was waiting up for him. She had something to show him. He wasn’t sure how much to tell her, but news had already filtered down from the Chasebridge estate to The Groves.
‘I’m so proud of you for saving that girl! At first I wasn’t sure about her, but I went up to the library and did a bit of research. I always knew there was something about that case that didn’t fit. That lass was peculiar all right, dragged up in the pub half her life, but I never had her pegged as a killer. But what about Bernadette Armley? Is it true she got carried off in an ambulance? Bit too convenient, that. I know you don’t have to tell me, but I reckon that son of hers has something to do with all this, and she’s been covering his back.’
He didn’t have the energy to remind her what she’d originally said about Marilyn Nelson and he wasn’t going to be led on the subject of Terry Starkey, he just shrugged and let her show him the printouts she’d made. He listened to her forming a campaign to get a pardon for Marilyn, until his eyes were closing. Before he went to bed, he sent Lizzie Morrison a text, but he couldn’t stay awake long enough to wait for the reply.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Doncaster
The New Moon Chinese restaurant was empty at lunchtime, which suited Sean fine. He was early, but he hadn’t been able to settle all morning. Lizzie had promised to meet him straight from the lab. He wanted to hear it in person, no email trail, no texts. She said she understood.
He asked for a jug of water and ordered a mixed starter. A bowl of prawn crackers arrived straight away and he broke one in his fingers and let it melt on his tongue. He wasn’t really hungry, but it was something to do. He checked the time on his phone. She was a minute late. There was music playing, barely audible despite the stillness in the restaurant, a high-pitched Chinese instrument full of sorrow. Then she was there, a laptop case over her shoulder, white blouse under her little black jacket, turning the corner of the stairs, the waiter showing her across the empty restaurant to where he was waiting.
‘Got it,’ she smiled briefly and sat down. She pulled a large, brown envelope out of the bag. ‘The paperwork was a bit tricky, but I said I was trying to rule out cross-contamination. That thread of denim you gave me at the Asaf murder scene? I wrote on the notes that I couldn’t be sure you hadn’t touched it, so I needed to order a double-blind test for your DNA against Starkey’s.’