Dead To Me

30

GILL HAD WATCHED Janet’s interview with Sean Broughton the previous evening and shared the sense that the lad had given them everything he had to give. The gathering anticipation of earlier days was likely to sour into anticlimax at this juncture, so she needed to pull the team together again and agree a new strategy to motivate them to go forward with renewed energy.

She made a quick head count, all present except for Andy, now coming through the door with coffee in hand. He passed Gill her cup.

‘Sean’s story,’ Gill began, ‘version three, director’s cut. Have we got anything?’

‘Motive,’ Lee said.

‘Yes, jealousy. The mystery shagger and the possible Dear John call.’

‘Opportunity.’

‘Kevin!’ Gill congratulated him. ‘And that’s our lot. Nothing to put a knife in his sweaty little paws or blood on his trainers.’

Kevin’s scanning of CCTV from the cameras on Oldham Road for a sighting of Sean, potentially in the act of disposing of bloodstained clothes or a weapon, had proved fruitless.

‘We charge him with theft and possession of controlled drugs, release him on police bail?’ She saw nods of agreement. ‘Which leaves us where?’

‘Looking for lover boy?’ Pete suggested.

Gill held out her hand, encouraging him to continue.

‘Savvy enough to wear a condom, but until we get the next DNA profile back we don’t know if he’s got any previous.’ The second tranche of DNA profiling – the material recovered from the duvet and bed sheet, skin cells and pubic hair – was still being processed.

‘There is an outside chance it’s random,’ Janet put in. ‘The door wouldn’t lock properly, so anyone could have gained entry.’

Several people groaned. Not being able to link the killer and his victim was the biggest factor in unsolved murders.

‘Let’s keep that for afters,’ Gill said, ‘because it is only an outside chance. To a stranger, the door would have looked locked, no reason to think he could get in. Relatively little disturbance at the scene too, which suggests the struggle was limited. So we widen our frame of reference: Lisa’s pals, her druggie mates, friends of Sean’s…’

Mitch nodded, he had already talked to some of her network, but now he’d develop that with a focus particularly on uncovering any other relationship Lisa was involved in.

‘How did her bit on the side get there?’ Gill said. ‘Car, bike, on foot? Back to the cameras.’

‘We don’t know what we’re looking for,’ Kevin protested.

Gill spoke swiftly, ‘We’re looking for a person slash vehicle seen both going towards Garrigan Street and away from Garrigan Street in our time frame.’

‘That could take days,’ Kevin groaned.

‘Somewhere else to be?’ she said.

‘No, but-’

‘You did very well with the cabbie.’ Dropping him a morsel of praise.

‘What if it’s someone off the estate?’ he went on. ‘They’d never go round by Oldham Road, wouldn’t pass those cameras. What if there’s-’

‘Kevin.’ She silenced him. He gave a mutinous look and began to scribble in his daybook. Possibly a death threat, she thought, or a choice four-letter word.

Rachel said, ‘What about the search for the knife?’

‘Where do you suggest we start?’

‘Say half a mile’s radius of the flat: drains, canal, skips.’

Costing the earth and maybe one or two small planets. ‘I don’t do scattergun,’ Gill said, ‘waste of resources.’

Rachel sighed and folded her arms, looked to Janet for support. Janet kept her head down, making notes. Not joining in. Good. Janet’s turnaround, her championing of the girl that morning had been one for the books. But Janet hadn’t lost her sense, she knew which battles were worth fighting, which points worth scoring.

‘Lisa put Sean off, so presumably she knew she’d be occupied with lover boy – but she hadn’t known that when she left the flat, or she’d have told Sean half three then. So how did they get in contact?’

‘Not a phone call,’ Pete said. ‘There were only three calls that day.’

‘The text, then, the unknown number?’ Gill said. ‘That’s most likely, but we can’t access it.’ She began to draw the briefing to a close. ‘Still, we know a great deal more than we did on Monday,’ she reminded them. ‘Timeline’s shaping up, we’ve eliminated a key suspect. For now.’ Allowing that, if they recovered other evidence, they might yet re-examine Sean Broughton. ‘I’ve a press conference later and we’ll be asking the public for help. That’s likely to keep the phones hot. Devil’s in the detail,’ she told them. ‘Now, I hope you haven’t forgotten it’s our Christmas do tonight, and I want to see you all there enjoying yourselves.’ A chorus of whistles and calls went up. ‘You can still remember how to do that, can’t you? Good. Until then, take it steady; get it right, lads, yeah?’

‘Boss,’ the chorus went round. Not fired up as such, but dogged. Dogged would do fine.

While the custody sergeant and Janet went to charge Sean, Gill contacted the FLO and asked him to inform Denise Finn that Sean was being released. Charged with theft and possession.

‘She’ll love that,’ he said.

‘No solid evidence,’ Gill said. ‘He’s looking much less likely.’

‘Still a chance?’

‘Not enough to mention. Don’t get her hopes up. Unless something new and very serious comes to light, Sean Broughton is no longer in the running.’

Christopher Danes was back on to her in ten minutes, while she was going over the draft of the press release. ‘She wants a word,’ he said. ‘I told her you might be tied up,’ giving Gill a get-out clause.

But she was a big girl. ‘Put her on.’

‘How can you let him out?’ Denise demanded. ‘You know what he’s like, what he’s done. He’s guilty as sin.’

‘We don’t know that,’ Gill said. ‘I can only charge someone if I have the evidence to do so.’

‘He battered her, he’s a fucking druggie, what about that?’ Denise said.

‘That’s not proof. Every single officer working on this inquiry is putting one hundred per cent into their work. It might take us weeks, months even, but we will look for the evidence that proves who is responsible for Lisa’s death.’

‘He’s a liar, you know. You can’t trust a word he said. He’s a liar and a thief and a vicious, nasty bastard. And you just let him go!’

Gill saw that Denise was beyond reason or logic, operating only on her belief that Sean was a murderer. Still, she kept repeating her position. ‘We had no grounds to hold him any longer without charging him. He has been charged with theft and possession of illegal drugs, those are the only crimes we have evidence for at present. What happened to Lisa was unforgivable, a terrible crime, and we want to make sure that the right person is caught and punished.’

There was a noise at the other end of the line and Gill couldn’t tell if Denise was crying or spluttering or even laughing with derision. Then Christopher came back on, ‘Thanks, ma’am.’

‘My pleasure,’ Gill said drily. Put the phone down and carried on with her work.

Gill had read through her prepared statement enough times to be able to say it from memory at the press conference. It gave a better impression, appeared more genuine than someone with their head buried in a piece of paper. In common with every other officer at her level, she’d been on several media training courses, learning how to project herself (that came naturally), build a media strategy, how to field inappropriate or challenging questions, how to debate with clarity and precision without getting muddled or personal. Keeping on message, conveying crucial points in a concise way.

Having told the assembled press that Sean Broughton, a twenty-two-year-old man, had now been charged with theft and possession of Class A drugs and released, and having repeated the key facts of the crime in an effort to jog memories, ring bells buried deep in people’s skulls, when it came to the ending of her speech, she picked up her notes.

‘I’d like to read out a statement from Lisa’s family,’ she said, and paused, waiting a moment for the attention in the room to focus, the noise levels to settle. ‘Lisa was a lively girl, a girl with a beautiful voice who loved to sing. A girl who had her whole life ahead of her. She was loved very much and we are desperately sad at this terrible loss. If anyone knows anything that can help the police, please come forward.’