Текст книги "Chameleon"

Автор книги: Jackson J. Bentley

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Chapter 5 7

FBI Field Office, Richmond, Virginia. Thursday 8:30am.

Just fifteen days after the deaths of the Hokobus, Pete was to witness Gillian Davis’ questioning, and he was looking forward to seeing her squirm.

Whilst they could have had the meeting in the Lynchburg satellite office of the FBI, the impressive building that housed the Richmond field office offered far more facilities. The building had a red brick facade that saw two wings springing from a central atrium. The windows were mostly square and the architecture plain, with the exception of the glazing over the front entrance which had a panel of square glazed windows, topped with a semi circular arrangement of windows above, almost like something one might see in a cathedral. A mock arch, constructed of light.

The reception area provided a respite from the cold winds whipping across the car park, and Pete and Dee were grateful for the overheated lobby. Steve Post brought them both visitors’ badges and then led them to a small conference room on the first floor, known as the second floor to their American hosts. From the window it was apparent that they were at the front of the building, in what would be the right hand wing when viewed from the front. They could see over the car park and to the road beyond.

Steve left the two alone with a tray of biscuits and some water in sturdy glass bottles, fastened with rubber ringed cork seals secured by a wire bound stopper; a little over the top, perhaps, for still water. A few moments later Steve returned, accompanied by DS Scott and DCI Coombes. Pete had never met the DCI, and so introductions were effected. Dee had not seen the DCI since her that fateful day at the London Eye, he enquired after her health. Dee appreciated his enquiry because she knew that he wasn’t a “people person” in any sense, and they weren’t friends even though they had worked closely together in the past.

The two policemen reviewed the evidence and explained their interview strategy to Pete, Dee and Steve. The evidence wasn’t solid, but it placed Gillian Davis very firmly at the scene of the crime.

***

The room overlooking the interview suite was necessarily dark. The subdued lighting allowed them to view the proceedings through one way glass. The sound was broadcast to speakers inside their room from microphones on the interview table.

Inside the interview room the two detectives sat opposite the suspect and her counsel. They had been friendly and quite disarming when they were introduced. They assured her that their sole intention was to clear up a number of questions that had arisen during their investigation into the deaths of the Hokobus. Her counsel, the redoubtable and quite famous Pat Gallagher, didn’t trust the Brits a jot. Why would he? They had stolen half of his beloved ancestral Ireland.

***

Gillian Davis wore a conservatively styled black jersey dress that covered her arms and fell to her knees. A patterned Pashmina hung around her shoulders, gathered at the front by a gold clasp at the nape of her neck. Her make-up was lightly applied and her jewellery was not ostentatious, despite her wealth. In the hour that she had been sitting in the room she had not spoken. Her counsel had answered every question on her behalf, but to his credit the answers were fulsome and helpful. Nonetheless, now was the time for the detectives to hit the former MI5 operative with their evidence.

“Ms Davis, we have evidence that places you at the scene of the crime at the relevant time. Would you like to comment?” Coombes growled.

“I don’t recall my client denying that she was in the vicinity of London’s third most visited attraction, along with hundreds of other people on that day or any other. Move on, please.”

Coombes growled again. “You were identified by a witness, who attests that you sprayed a paralysing substance in his face and kidnapped the Hokobus whilst dressed in a police uniform. Thus being the last person to see them alive.”

“Ah, I wondered when we would get to the mysterious policewoman. Before we address that statement, let me make one of my own. Surely the last person to see the Hokobus alive would be their killer, Inspector, and my client has never needed to deny that killing because she has never been accused of it. Should you deign to make such an accusation, I can assure you it will be denied, vigorously!”

The lawyer paused and looked at his notes.

“Now, about this policewoman. If the witness statements are correct, we seem to have a woman between five feet six inches and five feet ten inches. She was either blonde or possibly dark haired, it was difficult for the witness to be certain as she had her hat on. She had blue, green or brown eyes and a beauty spot above her lip, or not, as in the case of the artist’s impression. Finally she was very trim. She may have worked out, or, she had wide hips and an average sized bust.

I have to concede, gentlemen, that my client does indeed fit that description.” He grinned widely, and DCI Coombes seethed.

“Actually, we have a witness statement from the man she paralysed, who saw her close up and gave an accurate description which was then reproduced by a police artist. It is this description that makes your client a suspect in this matter.”

“Oh yes. I remember that witness. As I recall, he gave his detailed description to….” He paused to look at a copy of a police notebook that had been disclosed to him as evidence. “Detective Sergeant Scott! Well, how fortuitous. I guess that would be you, Sergeant?” he asked, looking pointedly at DS Scott. Scott nodded.

“Well, you should remember your reply, in that case.”

DS Scott flushed. How could he possibly know what was said at the scene? No-one would have written it down. He thought. The lawyer continued.

“If my sources are correct, you said that the description might fit half the women in London. Is that right, Sergeant?” The two policemen remained stoic, giving nothing away.

“You would be obliged to answer that in court, Sergeant, but if it helps, my investigator has a statement from the paramedic who attended the witness, if you would like to see it. In the meantime I assume that once again my client is prepared to concede that she could indeed fall into the classification of ‘half the women in London’. Now, if we could perhaps move onto some real evidence I would be grateful.”

The next few minutes were spent discussing CCTV footage of the parking garage that was inconclusive, the absence of physical evidence and a hire car that Gillian Davis had rented for the day and which was caught on camera in the general area, which the suspect did not deny. Coombes had played around enough; it was time for the killer blow to her defence.

“Ms Davis, this has all been very entertaining but there is one piece of evidence that is unequivocal and undeniable. We have a contact lens bearing your fingerprint and your DNA that you lost in the Hokobus car on the day of the murder. You were there, Ms Davis. You were in the car with the Hokobus. You sprayed them with your home made spray and then you killed them. I think that a jury will convict on that evidence alone.”

Chapter 5 8

FBI Field Office, Richmond, Virginia. Thursday 10:30am.

Dee was surprised to see that neither the suspect, nor her counsel, were at all affected by the fingerprint or the DNA evidence, neither of which had been shared with them previously. Dee wanted to believe that Davis’ facial control was magnificent and that inside she was terrified, but that did not gel. She looked calm and she was calm.

Steve Post had picked up on this, too, whilst Pete seemed unaware of the potential problem and so merely looked on in anticipation. The FBI man took his laptop out of hibernation mode and flicked on the CJIS search engine. With a few key strokes he obtained high level access to the recently completed CJIS database. Nestled in the West Virginia hills, not far away from the field office, the Criminal Justice Information Services building housed the world’s largest criminal database.

***

Pat Monaghan could hardly suppress his supercilious smile as he answered the accusation.

“Detective Chief Inspector. My client does not deny that a cosmetic contact lens with her fingerprint and DNA profile may indeed have been found at the crime scene.” He paused, giving the two policemen some hope that a limited admission would follow. “However, she does reserve the right to have our own experts carry out tests to confirm your allegation.”

The two policemen acknowledged that this was a reasonable request, but repeated their accusation that she had now been placed fairly and squarely at the crime scene.

“That is not strictly true, is it, Chief Inspector?” The lawyer enjoyed the puzzlement showing on the faces opposite. “If the contact lens had been found in a house, or perhaps an office or something else immobile that might be true. But even then we would have to accept the possibility that the contact lens could have been placed there long before the crime took place.

With a vehicle involved, your assertion becomes even more questionable...”

Coombes could bear it no longer and boomed, “Are you telling me that your client is denying that she lost her contact lens in that car? Mobile or immobile, it makes no difference. That is where it was found!”

“That may well be true, Chief Inspector, and if you had been listening you would have heard me say that, subject to testing, my client does not necessarily deny that she lost her contact lens in the car.

Unfortunately, you have allowed a single piece of flimsy evidence to blind you to other suspects. You have found one piece of forensic evidence and have fabricated – and I’m sorry to have to say it – a sloppy case around it.” The man reached down into his briefcase and extracted a few sheets of paper. DS Scott placed his hand on his superior’s arm to calm him down; the lawyer was in real danger of being throttled by Coombes, whose veins were now bulging.

“As you failed to conduct proper and fulsome enquiries, I have taken up the cudgels, as I think you say, and have made enquiries myself.

The car in question is a hire car, available to anyone with a driving licence. It has been hired out regularly since it was delivered some seven months ago. The car hire firm are able to say, with some precision, that they have rented out that car fourteen times for varying periods. Obviously, at any one of these junctures my client could have lost her contact lens. However, in an effort to assist the police, and to defray any accusations that her silence may be the equivalent to guilt, my client asked her former company to search their database to see if she had ever travelled in the said car.”

“Are you saying that she can’t remember travelling in an armoured car? Come on!” Scott interjected impatiently. The lawyer looked at Scott with an equally impatient glare.

“No, son, my client is saying she does not know if she had travelled in this particular car. She has travelled in many protected vehicles. Now, if I may proceed without further interruption.”

Dee and Steve were deeply unhappy. The interview was swinging in the suspect’s favour, and they were concerned that worse was to come. The lawyer hadn’t finished yet.

“Here we have a print out of the Celebrato accounts database. It shows that they hired a specialist vehicle from Exotic Cars of Longford for a business awards dinner. The tags – sorry, the licence plate – read X14 ECL, the very same car in which you found my client’s contact lens. Now, my client says she was a little the worse for wear the night of the awards dinner, and so she cannot swear that she lost her contact lens that night, but it does seem likely.” The lawyer pushed across the Celebrato Database record.

“Obviously as an attorney I am aware that a suspicious policeman might think that Celebrato have made this whole story up to allay suspicion, so I dug a little deeper.” He handed over three more pieces of paper.

“Sheet 1 shows a photograph of my client, on the night of the awards dinner, the same night the car was hired. Sheet 2 shows the Exotic Cars of Longford Hire Record Database for the period, clearly showing the hire to Celebrato. Sheet 3 is a sworn deposition from the manager of Exotic Cars that this is a proper extract from the said database, and a statement saying that, whilst the cars are thoroughly cleaned after each hirer, he cannot swear that a single contact lens would be discovered.”

DCI Coombes glared at DS Scott, whose mouth gaped open.

“Shit!” Pete shouted almost in Dee’s ear. Steve Post was already typing rapidly and accessing the CJIS database. After a moment the screen cleared and a pop up window appeared. The words, ‘This is Special Agent Connor Williams. May I help you?’ appeared in the dialogue box. Steve typed rapidly. The dialogue box flickered and Connor typed, ‘I will come back to you in a few minutes.’

Seeing the total disarray in the opposing ranks, Pat Monaghan suggested a short break, with the parties reconvening in an hour. He requested into the microphone the use of a quiet room, and some coffee and sandwiches. Gillian Davis and her counsel walked out of the interview room, to be met by the young FBI man who would lead them to their private room.

Chapter 5 9

FBI Field Office, Richmond, Virginia. Thursday 1pm.

Four glum faces sat around the table, ignoring the sandwiches that had been provided. Nobody had an appetite for them any more. DCI Coombes and DS Scott were not speaking and Pete was shaking his head slowly. He looked defeated. The thought passing through all of their minds was, ‘How could we have missed that?’

Dee, however, was not as downhearted as the rest of the team. She had spoken to Steve Post before they broke for lunch, and he had suggested pursuing a sequence of enquiries that had crossed her mind, too. They were still sitting in silence when Steve Post returned with a sheaf of papers in his hand.

“OK, listen up, everyone. It’s already 6pm in London and so not everything is buttoned down yet but here is what Dee and I think has happened. Steve sat at the head of the table and began his narrative.

“Gillian Davis has been a paid killer for ten years. Who knows how many people she might have killed in the service of Queen and country? Maybe she doesn’t even know the exact number. However, one thing is certain; she has never been caught. Gillian Davis is one clever girl. My guess is that, like most covert operatives, she is adept at misdirection, creating false alibis and manipulating evidence. If she wasn’t she wouldn’t be much of an assassin.

Psychologically we all know that witnesses are suggestible. They can often be manipulated into remembering things that did not actually happen. In the FBI manuals we have study after study that discusses witness behaviour. We regularly encounter witnesses who are sure they have seen something but, when it is put to them, by a clever attorney, that what they saw was not possible, their recollection suddenly changes and they revise their memories to incorporate the new facts. The truth is that once they have changed their story their testimony is useless. The profilers call this cognitive dissonance; if what we see doesn’t make sense, we create a new memory that does make sense. Psychologists say that if we humans behave that way, we would have continual internal conflicts and mental anguish.”

“In our view, the manager at Longford Exotic Cars was in just such a position. I just got off the phone to him. It seems that, whilst he has no recollection of that car being hired by Celebrato, he checked the records as requested and they showed that a hire had been arranged on that date. He has persuaded himself that he must have been busy elsewhere and so it had slipped his mind. Invited to do so by their investigator, he printed off relevant pages of the hire database and signed off on it. As for his testimony on the cleanliness of the car, I think a jury could foresee the possibility of a tiny, clear contact lens escaping the attention of a minimum wage car cleaner.

Given our conviction that you’re right about Gillian Davis being the murderer, Dee and I drew up a list of three questions for the manager that we felt might clarify the matter once and for all.

Question one – is there an invoice in the system for the hire, or did it appear only on the database?

Two – are Celebrato on Exotic Cars customer contact list? If so, when were they entered onto it?

Three – have their accounts department ever received a cheque for that hire?

In answer to those questions the manager has confirmed that there is an invoice, but it’s a little puzzling. It seems that the invoices are usually generated automatically by the computer software and are automatically given the next available number in sequence. That means that any invoice slipped in later will not fit into the numbering system in the order it should. Exotic Cars have confirmed that the invoice to Celebrato is not numbered in sequence.

Further enquiries have shown that no-one at the company has Celebrato on their customer contact list, which is very odd for a business that thrives on repeat business.

Finally, according to the book-keeper, no payment has ever been received by Exotic Cars for the Celebrato hire. The lady we spoke to appeared very professional and she also noted that the invoice did not appear on the VAT records, whatever they are. My contact at CJIS tells me that VAT comes with an onerous tax recording system that is strictly enforced. Conclusions?”

The gathering considered the new information, and slowly the frigid stares passing between the two policemen began to thaw.

“Someone hacked into the database and altered it. They created a fake invoice electronically, which never existed in reality, and then they directed the investigator to enquire about the non-existent hire,” DCI Coombes responded, clear admiration in his voice.

“Then the manager, confused by the conflict between his own imperfect recollection and a convincing paper trail that showed a hire had taken place, he subconsciously chose to accept the fake paper trail. Clever bastards!” DS Scott swore.

Steve Post looked at Dee.

“Dee and I both had the same thought and so a colleague of mine, who must remain anonymous, tried hacking into the databases of both Celebrato and Exotic Cars. He was able to obtain administrator’s access in less than a minute. Administrators can edit or alter records.

Dee, gentlemen, we have destroyed their rebuttal evidence but at the same time we have clouded the issue. In their favour, they have made a valid argument that undermines our key piece of evidence. A court is likely to accept, at least in principle, that one way or another the contact lens could have been in the hire car when Vastrick hired it. Unless you have anything else to offer, there is no prospect at all that the US Courts will grant an extradition warrant. The case is way too fragile at present, and that is before she wheels out the big guns who owe her father a favour or two.”

***

The interview reconvened, and DCI Coombes outlined their findings and suggested that the manager at Exotic Cars vacillated to such a degree that Davis’ reliance on his depositions was unwise.

“Bravo, DCI Coombes,” Pat Monaghan enthused, “you have confirmed exactly what we have been saying. No-one can have any confidence that the contact lens was dropped on the day of the murder. Now, I am quite certain that if we check carefully enough we will find that Ms Davis has an alibi for the time of the crime. After all, she is a busy woman, running a multimillion dollar business. My guess is that when we check her records back in London, those will also give rise to some argument.”

“You mean you’ll construct an alibi, whatever it takes,” Coombes snapped.

“DCI Coombes, we are here voluntarily. We were hoping to keep everything amicable, but you are becoming antagonistic. Please let me calm matters down a little.

Off the record, I believe we all know that you have no case against my client. An extradition warrant based on your alleged evidence will not even reach the court. It will be sent back for ‘want of cause’. The purpose of this meeting has been to confirm this reality to you and the persons sitting behind the glass.

Now, I am in the happy position of being able to assist you in the resolution of this terrible crime. I can confirm that my client knows who did kill the Hokobus.”

If Steve Post hadn’t given up swearing along with alcohol and coffee when he found religion, this would have been an occasion when he would have let rip a stream of profanity. Instead, his words were measured.

“Here we go. The SODDIT defence.”

“Sorry?” Pete asked, puzzled.

“Some Other Dude Did it,” Steve answered without humour.

***

“I am reliably informed that you will be receiving an encrypted email from the UK, specifically from the Home Office, which will contain a redacted version of a statement my client has made and which has been accepted by your superiors,” Monaghan stated. “Her statement will clearly say that another person committed the murders and that your own security services are aware of the killer’s past murderous history. Fortunately for us all, and perhaps by way of justice for the murdered couple, the murderer is himself dead and conclusive evidence of his demise has kindly been furnished by my cooperative client.

When you see the statement, you will see that my client is not attempting to hide her shameful involvement. On the contrary, she is shoring up your rather woeful case. No, my client is placing herself in the hands of the US authorities, who will consider the degree of her culpability, and she trusts that they and their UK counterparts will give her credit for her honesty and cooperation.”

When the lawyer stopped talking, DCI Coombs was almost speechless, but he soon found his voice.

“Why stop there? You lot can give her a medal, and on our side of the Atlantic we’ll see if we can rustle up an OBE. Hell’s teeth, your client is a hero.” He slammed his closed fist down on the metal table.

“Come on, Gillian, we’ve done all we can here,” the attorney said as he rose to leave, and on that note Gillian Davis and her counsel left the room and the building.