Page 30

TWENTY-NINE

‘Say hello to Peter Samuel Brightwell.’ Tanner stared at the mugshot on her computer screen.

‘Looks like a charmer,’ Holland said.

The individual to whom they now had a familial DNA match was easy enough to locate on any number of Met systems and databases.

Tanner had gone down the obvious route by logging straight into the Police National Computer and calling up the details of a man who had been arrested multiple times for a series of offences.

A man who had been in prison for the past three years.

‘Three guesses what he got sent down for,’ Tanner said.

Thorne nodded. ‘Name’s ringing a bell.’

Tanner, Holland and Thorne were gathered around a single monitor as Tanner switched between programs, swiftly accessing arrest records, photographs and court reports; providing a running commentary as she scrolled through multiple pages of information.

‘Brightwell was sentenced to life three years ago for the rape of a woman named Siobhan Brady and is currently doing his time at HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes.’

‘Life doesn’t get handed down for rape too often,’ Thorne said.

Tanner nodded at the screen. ‘There were aggravating circumstances.’

Thorne needed to read no more than a few lines before he sucked in a breath. Siobhan Brady had suffered a vicious and prolonged attack.

‘Pleading innocent didn’t do him any favours, either.’ Holland had moved across to the printer on an adjacent desk and was gathering up pages, doing his best to read them as fast as they spewed out. ‘Maintained he didn’t do it from start to finish, even with rock solid DNA evidence.’

Thorne walked over to join him, while Tanner carried on scrolling through different databases and printing out any documents that she thought might prove useful.

‘OK, it’s a familial match,’ Thorne said, ‘and I doubt the man we’re after is Brightwell’s father, so . . . his son, you reckon?’

‘Peter’s forty-four, so it’s certainly possible.’ Holland scanned the page he was holding. ‘He was married . . . in fact his wife gave him a false alibi for the night the rape took place and ended up getting six months herself . . . but there’s nothing anywhere to suggest he ever had kids, so—’

‘It’s his brother,’ Tanner said.

Thorne turned to look at her, thinking: Of course it is . ‘Love my bro . . . ’

Tanner gave him a thumbs-up. ‘Loves him a bit too bloody much by the looks of things. She nodded as the printer began whirring again. ‘Here he comes now . . . ’

Several photographs emerged, which Thorne and Holland gathered up and laid out on the desk.

‘Emily Mead did a pretty decent job,’ Holland said. ‘He’s lost some hair since these were taken, but that e-fit’s pretty spot on.’

‘Alex Brightwell,’ Tanner said. ‘He’s our killer.’

Thorne picked up one of the photographs. A man shouting at a small crowd gathered outside a building.

‘Thirty-three when those were taken, so thirty-six or thirty-seven now.’

Thorne lifted up another picture, a photo and a short article; a press cutting from the Wandsworth Guardian .

‘He tried to kick up a big stink at the time of his brother’s trial,’ Tanner said. ‘Local papers, local radio, waving placards around outside his MP’s surgery, all that. Didn’t do any good, obviously.’

‘What’s killing coppers got to do with any of this?’ Holland asked.

Thorne began to read aloud from the newspaper article.

‘ “My brother is innocent,” says Alex Brightwell (33). “I’m not going to claim he’s never broken the law, but he is not a rapist. Obviously people will claim I’m biased, but I know for a fact he did not commit this terrible crime.

The police have known the truth all along and there’s a very good reason why they’ve done everything they can to hide it.

There’s a reason why they’ve lied right from the start and why they’re continuing to lie and that’s because the truth is not in their interest. My brother was fitted up, it’s as simple as that, and I won’t rest until everyone knows what really happened and Peter is released. ” ’

Thorne handed the article across to Holland as though the answer to his question had now become obvious.

‘Looks like he ran out of patience.’

‘Oh, yes ,’ Tanner said, suddenly. ‘Get in .’

‘What?’

Tanner was staring open-mouthed at whatever information was now in front of her and pointing at her screen.

‘A fortnight before Peter Brightwell was arrested for the attack on Siobhan Brady, he was nicked for assaulting a sex worker.’ She glanced at Holland.

‘A charmer, like you said. She alleged that Brightwell refused to pay up once they’d finished their business and that he got a bit rough with her.

’ She read on, her smile broadening. ‘As it was, nothing much came of her allegation, because for whatever reason she eventually declined to press charges, but . . . ’ She turned to look at Thorne, beaming.

‘Who do you reckon the arresting officer was?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I’ll give you a clue—’

‘Come on, Nic—’

‘He won’t be eating doughnuts again any time soon.’

‘Tully?’

‘Police Constable Christopher fucking Tully.’

Thorne turned and leaned back against the desk, trying to work out where this new information left them.

‘OK, so it’s pretty clear that Alex Brightwell thinks Tully was a rapist, which he might well have been and maybe we’ll never know, but .

. . what? That’s the sole motive for killing him?

Alex Brightwell kills Tully, along with three other officers as collateral damage, just because he thinks Tully did something he believes his brother didn’t do . . . ?’

Thorne wasn’t convinced.

Tanner thought about it. ‘Unless he’s just planning to kill anyone who ever nicked his big brother for anything.’

‘Hang on, though,’ Holland said. ‘We checked Tully’s arrest record days ago. We checked all those officers’ records, but we had a really close look at Tully’s. I mean, didn’t we . . . ?’

‘Who was on it?’ Tanner asked.

Thorne knew exactly whose job it had been and was already marching across the office. A few seconds later he was slapping his hands down on DC Stephen Pallister’s desk.

‘Fine, so you open your mouth when you’d be better off keeping it shut,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s not against the law, and obviously you haven’t been on the team very long so maybe you’re still feeling a bit awkward or whatever, but are you actually a moron?’

Pallister just stared for a moment or two, then looked to others in the room as if one of them might come to his aid.

‘Apologies if that sounds harsh, DC Pallister, but it’s the only explanation I can come up with.

’ Thorne leaned across the man’s desk. ‘I really can’t think of any other reason why you’d have checked Christopher Tully’s arrest record and not thought the fact he’d arrested someone two weeks before the same individual was subsequently arrested and charged with aggravated rape was a fucking red flag . ’

‘I don’t understand,’ Pallister said.

Making at least some effort to keep the expletives to a minimum and struggling not to smack the DC in the side of the head with a stapler, Thorne walked Pallister through Tully’s arrest of Peter Brightwell at the home of the sex worker following her accusation of assault.

‘Shit . . . I don’t know,’ Pallister stammered, and reddened.

‘You don’t know?’

‘I must have missed it, that’s all.’

‘Right,’ Thorne said. ‘You must have.’

‘I’m sorry . . . ’

Thorne turned when Tanner called his name, to see her heading in the direction of Brigstocke’s office.

He held up a finger to signal that he was right behind her.

Shouting the odds when someone screwed up always got Thorne’s blood pumping, but it couldn’t quite compare with reporting a major break in a case to the Senior Investigating Officer.

There was still time for a parting shot.

‘Never mind thinking before you speak.’ Thorne stepped back from Steve Pallister’s desk and shouted as he walked away. ‘Just try thinking .’

Heading towards Brigstocke’s office, he caught sight of DI James Greaves standing in the corner of the incident room.

They exchanged nods. Greaves had clearly seen the aggressive dressing-down Thorne had given Stephen Pallister and Thorne could not help wondering which of them the CCU officer had been most interested in.

‘This job does my head in sometimes . . . ’

Done in or not, Brigstocke was shaking his head as he thumbed through the assortment of documents that Tanner had brought into his office with her.

‘It’s like you have days . . . plenty of days when you don’t get anywhere at all, when it’s like wading through treacle, and then there are days like this one, when a case just breaks wide open out of nowhere.

’ He looked up at Tanner and Thorne. ‘It’s days like this that make it worth coming into work. ’

‘Speak for yourself, Russell,’ Thorne said. ‘I’m excited every day I come in. I’m like a puppy chasing bog roll.’

‘Right.’ Brigstocke flashed a smile, which might well have been the first one Thorne had seen since this case had begun.

‘Now we’ve just got to find Alex Brightwell,’ Tanner said.

‘On the hurry-up, for obvious reasons.’

‘Should be the easy bit.’

‘It should be,’ Brigstocke said. ‘We’ll start with all the obvious searches. DVLA, voters register, banks . . . ’

‘I don’t think he’d be that careless,’ Thorne said.

‘Probably not, but we still need to tick all those boxes—’

There was a knock before Holland stepped into the office, looking as fired up as he had been when the DNA results had come in and starting to speak before he’d even closed the door behind him.

‘I’ve been doing a bit more digging into the Siobhan Brady rape case,’ he said.

‘Turns out that when Peter Brightwell was nicked for it, one of the two arresting officers was our hit and run victim.’ He nodded, pleased with himself. ‘PC Stuart Needham.’

A few seconds passed while that sank in.

‘Not a coincidence, then,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke was on his feet. ‘What about the other officer?’

‘Yeah, he’s still on the Job,’ Holland said. ‘Working out of a station in Surrey somewhere.’

‘We need to warn him straight away,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Maybe get him into protective custody. In fact, we should make efforts to contact every officer who worked on that case. Every uniform at whichever station Brightwell was held at, the desk sergeant who booked him in . . . ’

‘Witnesses at the trial,’ Tanner said. ‘Prison officers, maybe?’

‘It can’t hurt.’

‘We could be talking hundreds of people here,’ Thorne said. ‘There must be some way to narrow that list down.’

‘I don’t see how,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Needham was killed just because he happened to be the unlucky sod who slapped the handcuffs on Peter Brightwell three years ago, so why shouldn’t everyone else connected with that case be at risk?

’ He leaned down and started scribbling notes to himself.

‘I’ll get the late shift to make a start and let’s see where we are in the morning, when we’ve all had a few hours off. ’

Brigstocke carried on writing while Thorne, Holland and Tanner drifted towards the door.

‘You might want to think about getting shot of Pallister,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke looked up. ‘ What? ’

‘He’s a liability.’

‘Seriously, Tom?’ Brigstocke took off his glasses and wiped a hand across his face. ‘Bearing in mind everything we’ve just been discussing, you think now’s a good time to be losing a member of the team?’

‘No, obviously not, but if he messes up again—’

‘You never messed up, Tom?’

It was a question Thorne was able to ignore, as everyone present knew the answer.

‘Russell . . . ’ Holland stopped at the door. ‘I just wondered if you’d had a chance to look at that Daniel Sadler stuff I emailed to you.’

‘Your suicide?’ Tanner said.

‘ Possible suicide.’ He looked back to Brigstocke. ‘That weird business of the child porn charges never materialising, remember?’

‘I told you I would, didn’t I, Dave?’ Brigstocke said.

‘Yeah, I’m just—’

‘And I will . . . only right now I’m a bit too busy to be wasting time on what still sounds like a straightforward suicide. We’re all a bit too busy, don’t you think?’

Holland nodded and mumbled his agreement, having clocked the look from Tanner suggesting that he should stop pushing it.

‘Right, good, now you can all piss off home.’ Brigstocke waved them away.

‘Have a few drinks, because you’ve earned them, and most importantly, get some sleep.

Tom, Nic . . . ’ He reached for his mobile.

‘I need to make a few calls, but presuming I can twist an arm or two, you’ll be heading to Milton Keynes first thing tomorrow. ’