Poor Debbie, Kathy thought, listening to Oakley’s hatchet job. But it would be too easy to check for it not to be true, and, remembering the young woman wringing her hands in the front room of her mother’s house, Kathy could see it all too clearly.
‘But the lab didn’t want to turn it into a major industrial relations issue. Debbie was gone, and everyone just wanted to move on. Someone at the lab told me that it would help to have some kind of statement from her, and I volunteered to have a word with her. We’d always got on well, and I was outside the loop, less threatening. Okay, I may have cut a corner or two getting her signature, but it was in everyone’s interests, including hers. What was the point of rubbing her nose in it? No hurt feelings, no claims of wrongful dismissal, no problems.’
Oakley sat back, exchanging a look with his lawyer, who nodded at him as if to say, couldn’t have put it better myself, old chap.
‘Let’s turn to your meeting with Sandy Clarke on the twenty-third of May,’ Brock said. ‘Why did you lie about that? Was that none of our business too?’
Oakley took his time. He put his hand to his mouth in the same gesture Kathy had seen him use the previous day, then stroked his chin and said, ‘No, I genuinely didn’t remember it.’
Liar, thought Kathy. Too smooth, too bland.
‘There was so much going on that week, and, frankly, he didn’t make that much of an impression on me.’
‘But you remember now, do you?’
Oakley drew a desk diary from his briefcase. ‘I checked my old work diary, and found a reference.’ He opened it to a marked page and passed it across to Brock, who read the entry aloud.
‘“Eleven a.m. S. Clarke, partner Verge, his request- purpose? Pen-he to advise Chivers.” Would you interpret that for us?’
‘Well, as far as I can. First of all, the meeting was at his request-he’d phoned me the previous day to arrange it. And at the end of the meeting I was still unclear what the purpose had been. He talked about the effects of the publicity on his business and the morale of staff, etcetera, but I told him that he should speak to Superintendent Chivers about all of that. Then he asked how long the forensic tests would take, and when they could have access to the apartment again, and I described our progress in general terms. I seem to remember he asked about the DNA samples we’d taken from some of the staff, including him, and whether they’d be destroyed after the case was over. It was all rather vague, and I got a bit impatient, as I had things to do.’
‘What’s this reference to “Pen”?’
‘Yes, he slipped that in at the end. I didn’t really follow what he was saying at first. It seems that when he discovered the body he had a few minutes alone in the bedroom while the other person with him went to raise the alarm, and during this time he noticed a pair of his glasses and a pen of his lying in the room. He showed them to me, a silver pen and reading specs. He said he’d had no idea what they were doing there, and that either Verge or his wife must have picked them up by mistake. Anyway, he’d pocketed them, because there was no doubt they were his, and he wondered now if he’d done the wrong thing. I said he should tell Chivers, and he agreed. Then he asked if there were any other unexplained objects in the apartment that the police were interested in, and I said again that he should speak to Chivers, but I wasn’t aware of any. He seemed, I don’t know, over-anxious about the whole thing. I put it down to delayed shock.’
‘Did you report this to Superintendent Chivers?’
‘No, I left that to Clarke. There was too much else on the boil.’
‘Your memory seems to have made a remarkable recovery, Mr Oakley. Anything else?’
‘That’s the lot.’
‘Pity you didn’t tell us all this yesterday.’
‘Yes, well, like Phil said, if you’d gone about things differently I might well have been able to. No hard feelings, eh?’
‘One last thing. We’d like an account of your movements on the Monday before last, the seventeenth.’
‘What?’ Oakley looked shocked and his solicitor began to protest, but then Oakley stopped him, face grim. ‘Doesn’t matter, Phil. We’ll give the gentlemen what they want.’ He pulled his electronic diary out of his briefcase and began to tap. In the event, his alibi for the evening on which Sandy Clarke had died could hardly have been more solid. The previous evening, Sunday, he and a friend had flown to Dublin, where Oakley had grown up. They had stayed there two nights, returning on the Tuesday morning. The friend was a police officer, Sergeant Leon Desai.
Another envelope with her name in the familiar handwriting was waiting for Kathy at her desk. She steeled herself and opened it this time with hardly a tremor. Another forensic report form. Two samples, identified by number and a brief description, were listed at the top of the sheet, and beneath, in someone else’s handwriting, the words ‘Positive match’.
This must have been meant for someone else, she thought, then recognised her car number in the description of one of the samples. She read the descriptions again, then a third time as realisation came. One was the trace of material found on the broken glass in her car window, smashed on the fourteenth of September, and the other was the leather fibres found on the adhesive tape attached to the hosepipe used to gas Sandy Clarke on the seventeenth of September. Fibres from the same source, a pair of gloves most likely, three days and twenty miles apart.
25
I’ve just spoken to the local police,’ Kathy said. ‘They had nothing to tell me.’ ‘Take me through that day again,’ Brock asked. On the desk in front of him he had the report sheet that Leon had sent to Kathy, together with the original forensic reports on Clarke’s suicide and Kathy’s car.
Kathy consulted her notebook. ‘Friday the fourteenth, the day you interviewed Sandy Clarke, and he thought you’d discovered that he was the father of Charlotte’s baby because of his DNA. You asked me to go out to Buckinghamshire to speak to Charlotte, to check his story. I phoned her to say I was coming, and drove out there in my own car, the Renault. I got there about two-thirty p.m., and stayed for half an hour. She was angry that Clarke had told us about Atlanta and the baby, and seemed keen to keep it a secret, but she confirmed his account. On my way back to London, I stopped at a new supermarket outside Amersham and did some grocery shopping. I suppose I was inside for about twenty minutes, and when I came out I found the side window smashed and things missing from my car-the CD player, sunglasses and my briefcase containing the transcript of Clarke’s interview. I noticed that another car next to mine had been broken into as well. It was about the same age as mine, a blue Ford, and didn’t have an alarm. I went back into the supermarket to report it to the manager, who admitted they’d had a few similar break-ins.’
She turned the page of her notebook. ‘While I was in the car park I got a phone call from Robert, the administrator for the committee I’m on, wanting me to meet him urgently at headquarters, so I didn’t hang around to talk to the local cops. I left my details and returned to London.’
‘What else was in your briefcase?’
‘There was a small calculator… some notepaper, envelopes and stamps. The Clarke transcript was in a red plastic folder. There was a London A-Z. And I think there may have been the book that goes with my Spanish language tapes. I haven’t seen it since. The local police said nothing’s been recovered.’ Something else niggled at the back of Kathy’s mind, but she couldn’t pin it down. Then she remembered. ‘There was something else. The scrapbook you gave me to look at, Stewart and Miranda’s. It was in my briefcase too.’