any longer.’
‘No we don’t owe him. We are up to date. I keep record.’
‘Well, he said we did, plus he needed some float for travel and expenses, and you weren’t here. Anyway, when he’s good, he’s very, very good. He finds things out like nobody else. He’s a wizard.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘He’s a drunk wizard. He’s no good now, Dan. He smell of drink when I last see him. I tell you this many times. Why you give him money?’
He sighed. Like all real geniuses, Mickey was erratic and needed tight management.
‘He said his mother was in hospital.’ It sounded so lame. ‘He also said something about going to the races. To do with Jane McNeil.’
‘Jesus, Dan. Are you born yesterday? How much you give him?’
‘Five hundred.’
‘Jesus.’ She waved her plump hand in the air. ‘You totally crazy, Dan. In future, you let me deal with Mickey, please. I take care of him.’ She made a gesture of slitting her throat.
He closed his eyes again and sighed deeply, as much out of exhaustion as for the physical relief of expelling the stale air from his lungs. His head was still throbbing and he felt like shit. The last thing he wanted to do was trail around London looking for wherever Mickey had gone to ground, then try to extract the money from him. If he still had it, which was doubtful.
‘OK. OK. I agree it was a mistake.’
‘You need to find him, Dan. Now. We need this information now and maybe we get some money back. You want me to come too?’
NINE
‘I swear to you, I didn’t kill Jane,’ Sean Farrell said, for the third time, holding Eve’s gaze as though his life depended on it.
‘I believe you,’ she repeated, just to shut him up. She also wanted to placate him, so that he would talk to her openly, but underneath, she was far from convinced. In the back of her mind was what Dan had told her about the charges of rape, even if nothing had come of them. According to statistics, two women a week were killed in the UK by their partners, or former partners, one fifth of all homicides each year.
They were sitting opposite one another in the main visits hall at Bellevue Prison, just a table between them. The cacophony of noise and smells was distracting. She had no idea why they hadn’t been given a closed room, like her interview the previous day with John Duran. Maybe Farrell was considered less of a security risk. Or maybe Duran had the power to request such a thing. But the place was full, Farrell was quietly spoken and, against the background buzz of voices, she had to strain to hear what he was saying. He was at pains to emphasize his innocence but she could tell nothing from his words and body language. It had been over ten years since his arrest and his lines were too well rehearsed. It was impossible to know if he was speaking the truth. Even with newly arrested suspects, she had long since given up trying to intuit innocence or guilt from a face-to-face interview. Some people were great actors and liars, others were not. And some, totally innocent, appeared guilty as hell. It was difficult to read anything much from body language, or the look in someone’s eye, or the fact that their hands were sweating, or that they were crying. The evidence spoke louder and more reliably than any human could. The only thing she could say in Sean Farrell’s case was that the evidence was sorely lacking. Until she had a clearer, fuller picture, she was making no assumptions. But if he wasn’t guilty, who was?
She leaned forwards towards him, placing her hands flat on the table in front of her. ‘I’m sorry to make you go over all of this again, Sean, but we need to come up with something new. If you were trying to find Jane’s killer, where would you look?’
The fire died in his eyes. Maybe he had thought that just saying he was innocent would be enough, or maybe he realized he had failed to convince her.
‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled.
‘Come on. We need to find something.’
He shrugged, as though it were all meaningless, and shook his head. ‘There’s nothing new.’
His voice was surprisingly deep with a light, West Country accent. Even though he was seated, she could tell he wasn’t particularly tall, with broad shoulders, short, muscular arms and strong, workmanlike hands, which he kept clasped tightly in front of him. The shell-shocked man in the police mugshot from ten years before was barely recognizable. His short hair was now thinning on top and almost entirely grey, his face and neck thickened, the strain of prison life and his various appeals showing clearly in his exhausted eyes and the deep lines of his face. He had one final chance to prove his innocence and it was probably all that was keeping him going.
‘So where would you be looking, if you were me? You must have some idea, after all these years. I imagine you’ve been thinking of nothing else.’ If you’re innocent, she wanted to say.
His face hardened as though he read her mind. ‘I told the police she was seeing someone else, but they wouldn’t believe me. That’s where I’d look.’ He started to drum his fingers impatiently on the table.
He was like a stuck record, the same version being trotted out over and over again. He had been dumped. He had done nothing wrong. It had happened without warning. Rather than admit the possibility that Jane had just had enough of him, he was still fixated with the idea that there must have been somebody else. Maybe he was right. She reminded herself that seminal fluid had been found on Jane’s thigh and that it wasn’t Farrell’s.
‘Forget what you’ve told everybody in the past. As I said, I’m looking at this completely fresh. I know you were feeling very hurt by the way she treated you. You followed her around on a few occasions, didn’t you? She even made a complaint to the police.’
‘Doesn’t mean I killed her,’ he said belligerently.
‘Who did you see her with?’
‘Just Holly and Grace, mostly.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘A woman from the office. She was a bit older. I think her name was Annie, but I don’t think they were great mates.’
‘What about men?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘What about the man you saw her with in the bar in Marlborough, where you made a scene?’
‘Don’t remember his name, but the police checked him out. They told me he had an alibi.’
She made a mental note to speak to Dan Cooper again to make sure he had double-checked this. ‘OK. Tell me what Jane was like? Tell me everything you know about her.’
He frowned, as though not knowing where to start. ‘I dunno.’
‘What was so attractive about her?’ she prodded.
He gave her a blank look. ‘She was nice-looking.’
‘I meant her personality.’ He looked puzzled, as though it wasn’t what he had been expecting. Maybe in his book, looks were everything. ‘Was she lively, easy to talk to?’ she continued
