Page 38

THIRTY-SEVEN

Thorne had already left the office by the time Tanner returned.

Having met with officers on Rape and Serious Sexual Offences units in Hounslow and Notting Hill, she’d talked to both Brigstocke and Holland about what she’d discovered and, in a series of text messages, had agreed to bring Thorne up to speed later on, over fish and chips at Helen’s place.

‘We should eat first,’ Tanner had said. ‘It’s enough to put you off your dinner.’

As it was, knowing full well where Tanner had been, and what she’d said to Thorne, it was Helen who raised the subject before they’d finished putting the salt and vinegar on.

Neither Thorne nor Tanner was particularly surprised by her interest. After numerous scandals and high-profile failings, the Met’s ‘Sapphire’ teams – which had been established specifically to support the victims of sexual assault – had ceased to operate under that name a decade earlier.

Before being finally disbanded altogether, they had been merged with the force’s Child Abuse Investigation units to create a single, unified command.

Helen Weeks had worked for many years on one such unit.

‘Russell wasn’t lying.’ Tanner looked at Thorne. ‘ “Shitshow” is right.’

‘Craig Knowles?’ Thorne glanced up from trying to fit as many chips as possible between two slices of white bread.

Tanner nodded. ‘As we know, Knowles was convicted just over a month ago,’ she said. ‘A twelve-stretch, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke . . . but he was arrested for raping a woman named Priya Kulkarni three years before that.’

Helen grunted. She did not seem surprised.

‘He should have gone down for it,’ Tanner said. ‘Should have, but didn’t. If it hadn’t been for his wife, who he’d been happily raping for years, Knowles would still be walking the streets.’ She grimaced, like she was biting back something sour. ‘Patrolling them.’

‘Thank God for Mrs Knowles.’ Thorne knew that the rape of a woman by her husband was still a divisive subject.

He knew that whatever the law said, an awful lot of awful people – several of whom carried warrant cards – still refused to believe that non-consensual sex within a marriage was rape, and that accusing one’s spouse remained an incredibly difficult thing for a woman to do.

‘Why was the original case dropped?’

This was easily the most shocking element of what Tanner had discovered, and it intrigued her that Helen had asked the question, as though she could hazard a fairly good guess at what the answer might be.

‘The circumstances of Priya Kulkarni’s rape were very similar to Emily Mead’s,’ Tanner said.

‘Knowles had been to her home before, when she’d made a complaint about her car being vandalised on the drive.

He came back a few days later and assaulted her in her living room, in the middle of the afternoon.

He didn’t drug her, like Callaghan did with Emily, but if anything he was even more .

. . brazen. He knew that she could identify him and he didn’t seem overly concerned. ’

‘With good reason, by the sounds of it,’ Thorne said.

‘With very good reason.’ Tanner picked up a chip, then dropped it back on to her plate.

‘Priya goes straight to the police in Notting Hill and makes a complaint. All the necessary forensic samples are taken, a rape kit is put together and Knowles is immediately arrested. Pretty standard stuff up to that point.’

‘So, what went wrong?’

‘Well, according to the paperwork they dug out for me this morning, it was a “freezer malfunction”.’

Helen nodded, as if she’d guessed right. ‘Yeah, there were one or two of those.’

‘A what ?’ Thorne asked.

‘A malfunction,’ Tanner said. ‘Specifically, affecting the freezer at the forensic lab where samples were being stored before being tested. Nobody seems quite sure what happened, but it was accidentally turned off overnight, or a fuse blew, or someone didn’t shut the door properly.

’ She sat back and shook her head. ‘Either way, a number of samples were destroyed, meaning that several rape cases, including Priya Kulkarni’s, had to be dropped. ’

‘Similar thing happened once at a station I was at,’ Helen said. ‘Some moron left their lunch in one of the sample fridges and contaminated all the evidence. I’m using the word “moron” only because nobody could prove he hadn’t known exactly what he was doing.’

‘You’re saying it was deliberate?’ Thorne asked.

‘I’m not saying it wasn’t.’

‘So what happened to Priya’s sample might not just have been a malfunction.’

‘It’s impossible to prove,’ Helen said. ‘Certainly now, but there’s a history of these units trying to bump up their clearance rates by making any cases that are difficult to prove simply go away.

A couple of officers on a Sapphire unit in Southwark were caught deliberately suppressing evidence for precisely that reason.

’ She saw the look on Thorne’s face. ‘I know, and what’s worse is I don’t even find it shocking any more.

A rape case is always going to be difficult to win when it’s just he said/she said, and once you take the forensic evidence out of the equation, that’s usually all you’re left with. ’

‘Even better if the end result gets a fellow officer off the hook.’

‘Absolutely,’ Tanner said. ‘The forensic evidence that would have put Knowles away was no longer valid thanks to . . . whatever happened to that freezer, and Priya Kulkarni was gently persuaded to let it go.’

‘Or not so gently,’ Helen said.

‘Worst thing is, I think Knowles knew all along that’s exactly what would happen.

Remember I said he was brazen? According to Priya’s statement, he actually goaded her when he was finished.

He stood there, grinning while he zipped up his jeans and told her to go to the police if she wanted, because it wouldn’t do her any good. ’

‘It didn’t,’ Thorne said.

‘No, because he knew he could rape her with impunity.’

Nobody said anything for a while after that, and Tanner had been proved right as far as the effect of the conversation on their appetites went, with the food going cold and largely uneaten.

‘There was one other similarity between Priya’s case and Emily’s,’ Tanner said.

Thorne looked at her.

‘Russell was right about Priya not wanting to talk to me and I can’t really blame her, bearing in mind what happened . . . but it’s there in the initial statement she gave. Obviously nothing was ever made of it, because the case was dropped once the evidence had mysteriously defrosted.’

‘Another man at the scene?’

Tanner nodded. ‘Priya didn’t seem quite as certain as Emily was, but she mentioned that Knowles had left her front door open and that she thought she’d heard footsteps outside her bedroom. It’s certainly not as definitive, but—’

‘Fuck,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s not a coincidence, is it?’ Seeing that Helen was suddenly unclear as to what he and Tanner were talking about, he ran her through the story Emily Mead had told. The man who had shadowed her attacker and seemingly orchestrated her rape.

The disgust that washed across Helen’s face was obvious.

‘I suppose we should be thankful that some things are still shocking,’ Tanner said.

‘What happened to Priya?’ Thorne asked. ‘Afterwards?’

Tanner pushed her plate away and reached for the untouched glass of wine she’d been given when she arrived and which she suddenly felt in serious need of.

‘Not good,’ she said.

*

Six miles north in Clerkenwell, Dave Holland was discussing the same subject with his wife, though, as Pippa’s fertility window was still theoretically ajar, the half an hour or so directly beforehand had been rather more enjoyable.

‘She tried to kill herself,’ Holland said. ‘More than once.’

‘Shit.’ Pippa turned on the pillow to look at him. ‘I didn’t think Nicola had been able to talk to her.’

‘She managed to track down one of Priya’s friends. Apparently, she’s had several breakdowns and been sectioned a couple of times. She’s still under psychiatric care.’

Pippa tugged the duvet up a little. ‘Something we never really think about, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Think about enough, anyway. What it’s like for the victims later on.’

‘Especially if the perpetrator gets away with it.’

‘He did get convicted eventually, at least.’

‘Yeah, that’s something.’

‘Hopefully that helped her a bit.’

‘It doesn’t sound like it,’ Holland said.

‘No . . . ’

Holland stared up at a crack that zig-zagged from the central light fitting to the wall.

‘He wasn’t put away for what he did to her .

Rather than stand there in court facing him, being put through the wringer and called a liar, then likely as not watching him walk away scot-free .

. . she dropped it. Let them persuade her to drop it. ’

‘It must have seemed like the best option at the time.’ Pippa reached for her reading glasses and picked up the prize-winning novel she’d been struggling with but was determined to finish. ‘The best . . . worst option.’

‘To all intents and purposes, as far as everyone except Priya is concerned, that rape never even happened.’ Holland thought about what Tanner had discovered in the files at the RASSO unit; the manner in which Knowles had taunted Priya Kulkarni when he’d finished with her.

It was some small consolation that the ex-copper wouldn’t be feeling quite as cocky any more, locked up on the Beast Wing for what he did to his wife.

‘Christ, no wonder she’s . . . not well. ’

After a few minutes, Pippa laid her book down. ‘I was thinking about this other bloke, the one who creeps in and watches. He’s obviously someone who knew Callaghan and Knowles.’

‘Yeah, presumably,’ Holland said.

‘What about Tully? You already know that him and Knowles knew each other.’

Holland thought about it. They had not found any clear connection between Tully and Callaghan, but there was no denying that Tully seemed like the one Alex Brightwell had been most interested in. It was certainly something to consider, to talk to Thorne and Tanner about.

Could Tully have been the one Emily Mead had heard whispering instructions?

There were goose pimples on Holland’s arms suddenly, so he tucked them beneath the duvet and reached to draw Pippa to him.

They wrapped arms and legs around one another and, for a few seconds, Holland wondered if his wife was about to suggest having another crack at baby-making. He wondered if he should suggest it.

Neither of them said anything, content to leave it be.

‘When are you talking to Siobhan Brady?’ Thorne asked.

‘I’m waiting for her to get back to me,’ Tanner said. ‘She still lives in London, so as soon as, hopefully.’

Helen came back in from the kitchen and handed Tanner a Tupperware box containing the leftover fish. ‘For Mrs Slocombe,’ she said.

Tanner thanked Helen on behalf of her aged cat, and they both ignored Thorne when he began complaining, because he knew he’d find his appetite again and would have happily eaten the cold fish himself later on.

‘I’m not quite sure what you’re hoping to get out of Siobhan Brady,’ Helen said. ‘Her case is done and dusted and the man responsible is in prison. I mean, that’s what all the killings are about, isn’t it?’

‘Right, because at least one person doesn’t believe that man is responsible. I know there’s rock solid DNA evidence that says he is, but I still think it might be worth getting the victim’s take on it. I’ve looked through the trial transcript and she never gave evidence.’

‘ Two people,’ Thorne said.

‘Two people . . . what?’

‘Two people who don’t believe that Peter Brightwell raped Siobhan Brady.

You’re forgetting his wife.’ Ever since they’d talked about Craig Knowles’s wife coming forward to confirm his guilt, Thorne had been thinking about another wife who’d done the exact opposite. ‘She gave him an alibi, remember?’

‘Well, of course she did,’ Tanner said.

‘Yeah, but she stuck to her guns, even when the DNA evidence against her husband convinced everyone she was lying. Stuck to her guns so firmly that she ended up getting six months in prison for her trouble.’

‘You think it’s worth talking to her?’ Helen asked.

‘I can’t see any good reason not to. For a kick-off, being one of only two people who protested Peter Brightwell’s innocence, she might have something helpful to tell us about the other one.’

‘The one who’s now murdered . . . how many people?’

‘Six and counting, I reckon.’

‘I suppose it’s worth a try,’ Tanner said.

‘Mind you, I don’t know if her and her brother-in-law were even close.’

‘I hated mine,’ Helen said, pouring herself another glass of wine.

Thorne hadn’t thought about Tedious Tim in a while; the prick Helen’s sister Jenny had been married to before she’d finally seen the light. Thorne’s relationship with Jenny had improved considerably once she’d finally given him the heave-ho. ‘But there’s only one way to find out.’

‘I’m guessing that Peter Brightwell’s wife is someone else who’s not going to be a big fan of ours.’

‘It’s unlikely, certainly.’

Tanner stood up and walked towards the door to collect her coat. ‘Best of luck.’

‘You don’t need luck when you’ve got charm,’ Thorne said.

‘And a winning personality.’ He ignored Helen’s snort of laughter and watched Tanner pick up the Tupperware box from the table; its contents destined for an arthritic cat named after a terrible joke on a sitcom which nobody under forty could remember.

He said, ‘I don’t suppose me and Mrs Slocombe could go halves . . . ?’