Liar Liar

121

‘So do we charge her?’

Gardam dispensed with the formalities, getting straight to the point. Helen could tell he was wound up, so forgave him his unusually brusque manner. There was a lot riding on this call.

‘I don’t think we’ve got enough yet.’

‘I’m not going to teach you to suck eggs, Helen, but if we press charges then maybe she’ll realize there’s no virtue in continuing to hold out on us.’

‘But if we go too early we might lose her. Too many people have had their lives ruined by these attacks to let the perpetrator escape justice. We owe it to them to proceed carefully.’

‘I accept we don’t have chapter and verse but she has confessed. The interview was handled in exemplary fashion with a “thumbs up” from both the attending brief and the social worker. There can be no question that she was coerced. She confessed.’

‘So why the urgency to charge her? She’s not going anywhere. Let’s take the time we’ve got to continue questioning her and see if we can find more robust connections to the two fires she called in.’

‘What are you thinking?’

‘I want to know more about her connection to the Simms and the Harris families. She says she envied them, wanted what they had. But why them specifically? Why choose their homes above all others?’

‘She could have chosen them at random.’

‘But they are in such different areas of the city. She wouldn’t have passed these properties on a day-to-day basis and they were staked out with such precision, such patience. All of these attacks feel personal to me. The intent to kill was so clear. I can’t believe they were random. Can you?’

Gardam said nothing. He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t refute Helen’s arguments either.

‘I’ve sent Charlie to the Simmses and Sanderson to the Harrises to see if we can unearth a tangible link to Naomie Jackson. In the meantime, I’m going to ask Meredith Walker to go back to the sites of the second and fourth fires. Naomie had a clear motive to attack these properties, but as yet we have no tangible forensic evidence linking her to the crime scenes. There’s no witness statements placing her there, nor did she call them in. Why change her MO for the second and fourth fires? It doesn’t quite fit and I won’t be comfortable until it does.’

‘Then we keep on it. But after another twenty-four hours we’ll have to make the call. We can’t give the impression of drift on this one.’

‘Understood.’

‘So let’s find the evidence we need and bring this one to a close, right?’

Helen left Gardam’s office shortly afterwards, his gentle ultimatum still ringing in her ears. The team had clear lines of enquiry to pursue now and she hoped in time this would yield the breakthrough she felt they needed. She would be on it too, but not for the next hour or two. It was pushing midnight now and she had told the team to go home and get some rest. She craved sleep too, a moment’s peace, but there was somewhere she needed to be.

Or, more accurately, there was someone she needed to see.