Need You Dead

45 Sunday 24 April

Seymour Darling and his solicitor were already seated at the metal table in the sparsely furnished, windowless interview room. Darling seemed even smaller than the night before, as if these few hours in a cell had shrunk him further. The fifty-three-year-old’s own clothes had been removed for forensic purposes, and he was now dressed in faded police issue clothing that seemed a size too big for him. His narrow face, with its swarthy complexion, dark eyes too close together and slicked hair, combined with the shabby clothes, gave him the furtive, somewhat sleazy look of a street drugs peddler.

His solicitor sat beside him. An alert-looking woman in her early forties, with a mop of ginger curls, she wore a chalk-striped trouser suit over a white blouse, and fashionable glasses. A bottle of mineral water sat on the table in front of her, beside her large leather-bound notebook.

After cursory greetings, Grace and Batchelor sat down facing them, Grace positioning himself directly opposite Darling so he could watch his eye movements and body language. The fragrance the solicitor wore barely masked the rank odour in the room, which he realized must be coming from Darling. It smelled as if the man had slept and sweated into his clothes all night — which he probably had.

Both of Darling’s hands were flat on the table, as if he was trying to look calm, but his fingers gave him away. All of the nails were bitten to the quick, and on several there were raw marks on the surrounding flesh where they had been gnawed away very recently. Had he lain awake most of the night in his cell, tearing away at his nails, worried?

Would he be so worried if he was innocent?

Grace could have murdered a coffee, but had to put that out of his mind now. Maybe he’d get one in the staffroom when they took a break. He activated the video recorder, and the police officers identified themselves for the benefit of the tape. Then he gestured in turn to the suspect, then the solicitor. ‘Could you please state your names for the recording?’

For a while he was unsure whether the man would speak or not. The suspect just stared at him, sullenly. Then he said, ‘Seymour Rodney Darling.’ Moments later the woman said, ‘Doris Ishack, of Lawson Lewis Blakers, solicitor for Mr Darling.’

Grace continued. ‘I’m confirming the time as being 9.02 a.m., Sunday, April 24th.’ He looked hard at the suspect. ‘I’d like to remind you, Mr Darling, that you are still under caution. However, I will repeat the caution.’

Darling looked at his solicitor, who nodded to him. Then she said to the two detectives, ‘I’ve had the chance to speak to my client, and he is prepared to answer some of your questions.’

‘Good,’ Grace said.

‘Thank you,’ Batchelor added.

‘Mr Darling, what is your current occupation?’ Grace asked, focused intently on the man’s eyes. After some moments they moved to the right.

‘I work for a fencing contractor — pricing up fencing.’

‘How long have you been there?’

Again the eyes momentarily flicked right. ‘Just over two years.’

That confirmed to Grace which way his eyes would move when he was telling the truth. They were likely to move to the opposite side — the left, to the construct side of his brain — if he was lying. As Grace knew, it wasn’t infallible, but eye movements, combined with general body language, would be a good indicator. He next addressed the solicitor. ‘We have already disclosed to you, Ms Ishack, that your client has recently become known to the deceased, and it appears there has been a dispute of some kind between your client and the deceased.’

‘I may have been in dispute but I didn’t kill her,’ Darling said, flatly. His eyes remained dead ahead, but now he folded his arms, which was a defensive, challenging position.

‘How long had you been in contact with Lorna Belling?’ Guy Batchelor asked him.

‘A couple of weeks.’

‘How did you get to know her?’ he continued. ‘What were the circumstances, and what was the nature of your relationship?’

‘Relationship? What are you insinuating? I met her about a bloody car she advertised on eBay. An MX5. I wanted to buy it as a birthday present for my wife.’

‘Did you have a nice bonus from work — or make a big sale?’ Grace quizzed.

‘Is this relevant?’ the solicitor asked.

‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘It seems a rather unusual and expensive present.’

‘Yeah, well I had some redundancy money from my previous job, and it’s actually a very special birthday,’ Darling said.

‘A milestone?’ Grace asked, jotting down a note.

‘You could say that. This will be her last birthday, she has terminal cancer. Four to six months is the prognosis. She’s always loved those little Mazda sports cars. I thought, you know, summer’s coming, her last summer, she can put the roof down.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Grace said. Batchelor nodded his sympathy, too. Then after a short pause he asked, ‘Can you give us details of exactly what communications you had with Mrs Belling?’

‘I’d been looking around for a car on all the sites, you know? Autotrader, Gumtree, eBay — she particularly wanted that red colour. I saw the one Mrs Belling had up on eBay, and I arranged to go and see it.’

‘And you went?’ Grace asked.

‘Yes.’

‘When was that?’

His eye movements revealed to Grace he was telling the truth. ‘About a fortnight ago.’

‘Where did the meeting take place?’ he asked.

‘In the street outside her home.’

The two detectives shot a glance at each other. ‘What was the address?’ Batchelor asked.

‘A block of flats. Vallance Mansions. Right opposite the King Alfred leisure centre.’

Grace wrote on his pad: 1. Did not know before. 2. Been in contact. 3. Met. 4. Why there?

‘Can you tell us what happened at the meeting?’ Batchelor asked.

‘Yes. I thought she seemed a straightforward woman. The car looked nice — better than she had described it, in fact. Maybe I should have twigged then.’

‘Twigged?’ Batchelor asked.

‘That I was being set up for a con.’

Grace gestured with his hands. ‘Just continue with what happened, for a moment, please.’

‘We took the car for a short test drive. I liked it a lot, but I couldn’t afford more than £2,800 — I’d been offered a loan, but it was at extortionate rates. She’d advertised it for £3,500 but no one pays the asking price, do they?’

Neither detective commented.

‘So I told her £2,800 was my best offer, she said she was in a hurry to sell and would take it. We agreed I’d make payment on eBay through PayPal — that was what she wanted — I would have been happy to give her folding, but she wanted it through PayPal. I understand why now. I should have smelled a rat then.’ He gave a bitter laugh.

‘Smelled a rat?’ Batchelor asked.

Belling glanced at his solicitor, who gave him a nod of encouragement. ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever bought a second-hand car, detective, perhaps your police salaries are so high you don’t need to?’

‘I wish,’ Batchelor said.

Darling and his solicitor both gave fleeting smiles. ‘Yeah, well in all my past experience, vendors negotiate. I offered what I thought was a ridiculously low price, expecting her to come back with a counter — perhaps three-two. But she didn’t. She just said, fine, she’d accept £2,800. I asked her how quickly we could complete the transaction — I wanted to get the car valeted, and then put it outside our house, with a ribbon around it and some flowers in the boot, so my wife would be blown away on her birthday. She said I could take the car away just as soon as she received payment and she sent me her PayPal details. So that’s what I did, the following day. I told her the payment had gone through, then the bitch told me she’d not received any money. She was lying.’

His body language was consistent with someone telling the truth, Grace thought.

‘What happened then?’ he asked.

‘We’d agreed I would collect the car last Saturday morning. I had made payment in full through eBay’s checkout page into her PayPal account on the Thursday — the one she had given me. The money should have been there instantly, but she denied all knowledge of receiving it, the bloody thieving bitch.’

‘The Economic Crime Unit think you may have been a victim of online fraud,’ Grace said. ‘Did you consider that?’

‘Yes. Yes, I checked, of course, right away, with PayPal. They told me there was no such account, the details she had given me were not for a PayPal account.’

Batchelor frowned. ‘What account were they for?’

‘I still haven’t found out. She was a bloody scam artist. Instead of arresting me and locking me up, perhaps you’d like to go and recover my sodding money for me, so I can do something nice for my dying wife?’

Still watching him closely, Grace asked, ‘Would you like to tell us your feelings about Lorna Belling?’

Doris Ishack raised a warning hand and leaned over to her client. Belling nodded, then answered, once more his eyes moving left, first. ‘I’ve just told you, she was a con artist.’

‘What makes you feel it’s her who was the con artist and that you’ve both not been a victim of cybercrime fraud?’ Grace went on.

‘How would you feel if you were in my position, detective? You’ve just paid out more money than you can afford, and you find out you’ve been screwed. Go on, how would that make you feel?’

Privately, Grace considered that perhaps Darling knew he had been conned but had thought he might bully or frighten Lorna Belling into handing over the car — given the man’s track record of violence. But he would leave that one for the prosecution counsel, if it came to court.

‘Angry enough to kill that person?’ Grace tested.

‘That’s a leading question, Detective Superintendent,’ the solicitor interjected.

The two detectives sat whilst Darling and Ishack conferred in whispers. Then, with an irritatingly smug expression, Darling said, ‘No comment.’

Grace leaned forward and pressed a button on the recording control in front of him. ‘Interview suspended at 9.20 a.m.’