Sam stopped abruptly.
‘Please go on,’ Vogel prompted.
Sam looked as if he was about to continue, then he shook his head.
‘No, Mr Vogel,’ he said. ‘I just can’t. You’re going to have to ask Felix. I’ve already intruded unforgivably on the lives of my son and his poor wife, you said so yourself, and with terrible consequences.’
‘Look Sam, you’ve been guilty at least once before of withholding evidence during the course of this investigation. Please don’t make the same mistake again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam. ‘It’s just too much, you see. Felix must decide whether to tell you.’
Vogel raised his voice very slightly.
‘You are treading very dangerous ground, Sam,’ he said. ‘You should be aware that I could charge you with perverting the course of justice. And Felix too, if he also decides to hold out on us.’
Sam shrugged.
‘You must do whatever you have to, Mr Vogel,’ he said.
He spoke quietly, which somehow made him sound all the more obdurate. Vogel considered he was going to get no further with Sam Ferguson on that particular line of questioning. Not for the moment, anyway.
‘All right, Sam,’ he said. ‘Let’s move on, for the moment. Are we to presume that the people who employed Gerry to spy on Jane knew whatever it was that she had done, and had her watched all those years because of it?’
‘Yes, Mr Vogel,’ he said. ‘That’s what I came to believe, anyway. Although I still don’t understand it. Indeed, they may well have been protecting her from afar, until they learned what she had remembered. Which, they wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t allowed Gerry to plant his damned surveillance camera. Collaborated with him, in fact... ’
Sam leaned forward slightly in his seat and lowered his face in his hands. He continued to speak, mumbling slightly through his fingers.
‘I asked Gerry again yesterday, who and why. He said he had never known why, not really, and I had to trust him, it was better, far better, if I didn’t know who.’
Sam looked up.
‘He was right about that, wasn’t he?’ he said. ‘They nearly killed me back there.’
‘Somebody tried, that’s for sure,’ agreed Vogel.
Sam might be a big burly man, fit for his years, but he was clearly deeply shaken. His face was ashen, and his hands were still trembling. Vogel thought it was time to get him medical attention, but he had one last question. The most important of all.
‘Sam, did Gerry have camera footage of Jane’s murder?’ asked the DCI.
‘No,’ said Sam. ‘Or at least, that’s what he told me. He said the surveillance camera had stopped working. It was the first thing he checked after he and Anne discovered Jane’s body. In fact, he said he spent most of the rest of that night fiddling with his phone, checking and double-checking, but the last forage he had was from earlier in the evening when Felix had gone up to his bedroom to change into his dinner suit. Gerry didn’t know whether something had gone wrong with it, maybe the battery had drained, or if someone had deliberately dismantled it before killing Jane.’
‘So that someone would have to have known it was there in the first place, and you don’t think Felix had any idea he was being filmed, do you, Sam?’
‘I’m sure he didn’t,’ replied Sam firmly.
‘One last thing,’ said the DCI. ‘I know you didn’t harm Gerry, you thought he’d asked you to meet him here, but where were you this morning?’
Sam laughed briefly and without humour.
‘I drove to Exeter to try to get a meeting with the chief constable,’ he said. ‘I thought that if anyone knew what was really going on, it would be him. And I thought he might help me. We used to play rugby together. But he clearly didn’t want to see me. I waited for hours before giving up.’
‘Why didn’t you tell your wife that?’
‘Look, it was before Felix was arrested. Amelia still believed Jane had taken her own life, and thought I did too. She would just have worried. When I arrived home and walked in on the arrest, I wasn’t going to come out with it in front of all of you. Then later, well, I’d failed, hadn’t I? So there didn’t seem much point. To tell the truth, I haven’t really known what the hell I’ve been doing since Jane died.’
‘All right, Sam, that’s enough for now,’ said Vogel. ‘But you do realize I will have to talk to you again, don’t you? Particularly if Felix fails to give us the information we need. Next time, it will be a formal interview at the police station, and if you refuse to offer your full cooperation you will be charged accordingly.’
Sam nodded very slightly. He looked as if he was past caring.
An ambulance had arrived. Two paramedics were standing by it. Vogel escorted Sam over to them, impatient now to get to Barnstaple police station. There were two men detained there who he was, by the minute, becoming more and more eager to interview.
Thirty
On the way to Barnstaple Vogel spoke to DI Peters back at the incident room to inform her of all that had occurred. He asked her to organize a CSI team to search Granger’s flat, which didn’t require a search warrant as the man had been formally arrested on suspicion of a capital offence.
‘The address should be in the system,’ he said. ‘On that list of members of the NDYC.’
He also asked Peters to dispatch DC Perkins to Estuary Vista Close to re-interview Anne Barham.
‘I wonder what she really knows about her husband’s past, Saslow,’ Vogel mused. ‘A special branch of the civil service, eh? Looks like he might have been some sort of spook. If he was, it’s hard to believe his wife didn’t have any idea. He must have been darned good at his job.’
‘He didn’t look like a spook, seemed like a bit of a nerd to me, boss,’ said Saslow.
‘What would you expect?’ asked Vogel. ‘James Bond? Think boffin instead of nerd. GCHQ is one of our major secret intelligence services, and it’s staffed almost entirely by high-tech whizz kids, mathematicians, linguists, and the like. All top level.’
‘OK, but do we really believe the British intelligence service goes around murdering people? That’s pretty James Bond, isn’t it?’
‘They call it lethal force, I understand, Saslow. And I certainly don’t believe it’s unique to the Russian secret services. I wonder if you remember the death of Gareth Williams, he was a mathematician employed by GCHQ and seconded to MI6?’
‘No, boss, I don’t think I do,’ responded Saslow.
‘Ten years ago, probably before you were in the job, you’re so damned young, Saslow,’ said Vogel. ‘I was in the Met, of course. Still a DC. It wasn’t our finest hour. Williams’ decomposing body was found in a North Face bag, padlocked from the outside, in the bath of his Pimlico flat. Our brass and MI6 collaborated on how the investigation should be handled, and all sorts of restrictions on information were imposed. Nonetheless, there was an inquest, as the law demands, and the coroner described Williams’ death as “unnatural and likely to have been criminally meditated”, prompting a second investigation. After another twelve months, the then DAC at the Met announced that the most probable scenario was that Williams had died alone in his flat as the result of locking himself in the bag.’
‘Wow,’ said Saslow. ‘That sounds like some cover-up, boss.’
‘And all in the interest of national security, Dawn,’ Vogel continued. ‘It has to be possible that something of that nature was going on here. I’m pretty sure it’s what Nobby Clarke was driving at.’