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SEVENTEEN

According to the ID she’d produced at Clapham Town station the day before, Emily Mead was twenty-seven years old, but the woman sitting opposite Thorne and Tanner in the interview room at Colindale could easily have been a good few years older than that.

Not that people in her situation ever appeared at their best.

It might just have been that she was make-up free and exhausted after a sleepless night in the cells.

It could have been down to the harsh overhead lighting, which was rarely flattering.

Or perhaps something else entirely had taken the colour from her face, hollowed out her cheeks and produced those premature lines around her mouth and blue-black shadows beneath her eyes.

It might just have been her life.

Whatever had derailed it.

Tanner stared across the table as she recited the caution and reminded the suspect that she had waived her right to a solicitor and that the interview was being recorded.

The young woman did not raise her head. The fingers of one hand beat out a nervous tattoo against the steel tabletop while those on the other moved back and forth through her short, straw-coloured hair.

‘Do you understand?’ Tanner asked.

Emily Mead’s head stayed down, but she eventually mumbled a ‘Yes’.

Since arriving at the station first thing, she had barely spoken, aside from repeating what she had told the officers in Clapham, stating again that she had ‘been there when Adam Callaghan was killed’. This time, though, she had been keen to add a somewhat crucial caveat.

‘But it wasn’t me that killed him. I didn’t know that was going to happen.’

‘Tell us about the man in the park, Emily.’ Thorne waited. ‘When you made the emergency call you said a man was harassing you, but that’s not what was happening, was it?’

She shook her head.

‘For the tape, please.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘So, who was this man?’

‘I don’t know his name.’ Her voice was low and quiet, every bit as colourless as her face. ‘I’d never even met him until the other night.’

‘How did you know him?’ Tanner asked.

‘It was all online,’ she said. ‘This secret group called Roasting the Pork.’

‘To be clear . . . that’s an anti-police message board on the Dark Web, correct?’

‘Yeah . . . that one. He messaged me so that we could talk privately.’

‘What did you talk about?’ Thorne asked.

‘What do you think?’

‘Specifically.’

It took her a few moments. ‘He really hates you lot, I mean, properly hates all of you.’ She had begun to raise her head, but just for a few seconds at a time. ‘I mean, nobody in that group likes the police very much, but he’s serious about it. Like he’s obsessed, you know?’

‘Are we talking now about the individual who uses the online alias LoveMyBro?’ Based on the message Tanner had seen, it seemed like a reasonable assumption.

Emily nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s him. Once we started talking, he just kept banging on about making you pay, about coppers getting what they deserved after what they’d done.’

‘And what was it exactly he said they’d done?’ Tanner exchanged a look with Thorne. ‘That we’d done?’

‘He never told me.’

‘He just wanted you to help him.’

‘Yeah, obviously that’s what was really going on, but I didn’t know that then, did I? It was supposed to be all about him helping me.’

‘Helping you with what?’ Tanner asked. She waited for the woman to raise her head again. ‘Why did you need his help?’

She asked again, but Emily Mead’s head stayed down.

‘OK, let’s talk in more detail about what happened in the early hours of yesterday morning,’ Thorne said. ‘You made the 999 call to lure Adam Callaghan to the park, is that right?’

‘Yeah . . . ’

Thorne’s mobile vibrated. A message from Russell Brigstocke who was watching via video link from the floor above.

How did they know it would be Callaghan?

‘Emily . . . how could you or the man you were with be sure that it would be PC Callaghan who would attend?’

Now, the woman looked up, a little more animated.

‘He knows all that stuff. He studies these coppers for weeks, their shift patterns or whatever. He knew Callaghan was on nights, where he ate when he was on that shift and exactly what time he’d be there.

He knew it would be him, and if anything did go wrong and for some reason it wasn’t him, he just told me to blag my way out of it and we’d try again another time. ’

Thorne glanced towards the camera. ‘Right. So you met this man in Hendon Park and then you made the call.’

‘Well, we met up before that, before I called 999.’

‘Where was that?’

‘Still in the park, but at the other end. Not the bit where . . . Callaghan was killed. There’s this wooden footbridge near the railway line and we just sat there for half an hour, smoking fags while he talked me through it all.

What was going to happen. Well . . . what I thought was going to happen.

That was before I knew what he’d done, though, you need to know that. ’

‘What he’d done?’ Tanner said.

‘I had no idea it was him—’

‘What did he do?’ Thorne asked.

‘I really didn’t know, I swear I didn’t.’ She looked in desperation from Thorne to Tanner and back again, a film of tears across her eyes as her breathing began to quicken. ‘I didn’t know he was the one who poisoned those coppers.’

Thorne looked at Tanner, then raised his eyes to the camera. The fact that the three dead officers had been poisoned was one they had not yet released to the press.

Emily clocked their reaction and began nodding. ‘Right, yeah . . . that was him. That arsehole fed arsenic to four coppers and there was only one he was actually bothered about.’

‘Are you talking about Christopher Tully?’ Tanner asked.

‘Yeah, Tully.’

‘Wait a second.’ Thorne pushed his chair back. ‘Interview suspended at . . . 9.17 a.m.’ He stood up and walked towards the door, turning back to talk to Tanner. ‘Give me two minutes.’

Holland, who had been watching alongside Brigstocke, came haring along the corridor looking every bit as confused as Tanner had been when Thorne had left the interview room. He held out his arms, revealing a dressing taped across his palm.

‘What’s going on? You were just about to get—’

‘I’ll still get it,’ Thorne said. ‘But we need to send a small team of officers down to that footbridge she was talking about, pronto.’

Holland hesitated, trying to work it out.

‘She said they were smoking, right? When they met up.’

‘Cigarette ends,’ Holland said, getting it. ‘Good shout.’

‘We know he’s careful, don’t we? No prints or DNA on anything up to now and maybe that’s because he’s in the system.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘He doesn’t know Emily Mead’s here, though, does he? He doesn’t know she’s told us about their pre-murder chit-chat at that footbridge. As far as he’s concerned, nobody would know he was ever there, so . . . ’

‘No reason for him to be careful with his butts.’

‘That’s the theory,’ Thorne said.

‘Worth a try,’ Holland said.

‘I mean, I haven’t given it much thought, and it might be too late already if there were cleaners down there yesterday.’

‘On a Sunday?’

Thorne nodded, relieved and delighted that the day of rest enjoyed by employees of Hendon council’s Parks Maintenance Department might yet give them a chance.

‘Let’s get every fag end anywhere near that footbridge collected up and sent straight to the lab on an urgent.

’ He turned back towards the interview room. ‘See if we get lucky.’

Emily Mead had calmed down a little by the time Thorne had sat down again, let Tanner know that he’d fill her in later and the interview was recommenced.

‘You’ve told us that this man confessed to the murder of three police officers and the attempted murder of another,’ Thorne said. ‘Fed them arsenic, that’s what you said.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s what he said. He was sort of bragging about it.’

‘When was this, Emily?’

She looked a little confused. ‘When . . . ?’

‘When did you know that this man you met online and were now hanging around in the park with in the early hours of the morning had already killed three police officers?’

She was beginning to look uncomfortable again. ‘It was after he’d killed Adam Callaghan, and like I’ve already told you, I had no idea that was going to happen.’

‘Yes, you’ve made that very clear,’ Tanner said.

Thorne’s phone buzzed with another message from upstairs:

How did he know where those officers were going to be? The poisonings .

Thorne showed the message to Tanner and asked the question. ‘This man who’d confessed to poisoning the police officers, did he tell you anything about how he’d planned it?’

Emily shook her head.

‘They were part of a highly confidential operation,’ Tanner said. ‘So, how did he know those officers would be there?’

‘I’ve got no idea,’ Emily said. ‘He knows all sorts of stuff, though, I told you. He’s got special computer programs or whatever; he’s got fancy equipment.’

‘A scanner?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘OK, let’s move on,’ Thorne said. ‘Talk us through what happened after PC Callaghan arrived in response to your emergency call.’

Emily gave a small nod. She sat up a little straighter and took a few deep breaths.

‘He was hiding in the trees,’ she said. ‘The man I was waiting there with. Callaghan was calling out as he got closer, trying to find out where I was, and as soon as I started shouting back the man got out of the way.’ She stared at Tanner, helpless.

‘He was just there to protect me, that’s what he said, which was fine because I could never have gone there on my own, except I didn’t even know he had a knife.

He told me he was there to make sure nothing bad happened. ’

‘Something bad did happen,’ Thorne said. ‘I’m fairly sure that’s how Adam Callaghan’s family would see it, anyway.’

‘Go on, Emily,’ Tanner said.