The Truth-Teller's Lie Read online

  Kombothekra paused to clear his throat. He was tall and thin, with shiny black hair, olive skin and a prominent Adam’s apple that Charlie couldn’t help looking at. It leaped up and down as he spoke. ‘Both women were forced into a car at knifepoint by a man who knew their names and behaved as if he knew them until he got close enough to produce his weapon. Prue Kelvey just said a black car, but Sandy Freeguard was more specific: a hatchback, registration beginning with a ‘Y’. Freeguard describes a corduroy jacket that sounds like the one Naomi Jenkins described. In all three cases the man was tall, Caucasian, with short dark-brown hair. Kelvey and Freeguard were both made to sit in the front passenger seat, not the back seat, so that’s the first difference between our two cases and Naomi Jenkins’ statement.’

  ‘The first of many,’ Charlie chipped in.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kombothekra. ‘Once in the car, both women had eye masks put over their eyes—another point of similarity—but unlike Naomi Jenkins, at that point they were ordered to remove all their clothes from the waist down. Both did as instructed, fearing for their lives.’

  Proust was shaking his head. ‘So we’ve got three cases—three that we know of—of women being driven in broad daylight for, as far as we can tell, long distances, with masks over their eyes. Didn’t anybody see the car and think it was suspicious? You’d think somebody passing on the street would have seen a passenger wearing an eye mask.’

  ‘If I saw that, I’d assume they were trying to have a nap,’ said Simon. Sellers nodded his agreement.

  ‘Nobody came forward immediately,’ said Kombothekra. ‘After our television appeals, three witnesses made contact, but none of them could tell us much more than we already knew: a black hatchback, a passenger with something over their eyes, nothing at all about the driver.’

  ‘So, front passenger seat rather than back seat, clothing removed en route rather than at destination,’ Proust summarised.

  ‘Kelvey and Freeguard were both continually sexually assaulted during the drive. Both said the rapist drove with one hand and used the other to touch their private parts. Both said he wasn’t rough or violent. Sandy Freeguard said she thought he was doing it to show that he could more than anything else. It was about exercising power rather than inflicting pain. He made them sit with their legs wide apart. In both cases, he said something very similar to what Naomi Jenkins claims her attacker said: “Don’t you want to warm up before the show?”’ Kombothekra consulted his notes. ‘Kelvey’s version was “I always like to warm up before a show, don’t you?” She didn’t know what show he was talking about at that point, of course. Freeguard was told, “Think of this as a little warm-up before the big show.”’

  ‘So it’s the same man, no question,’ said Proust.

  ‘It seems very likely,’ said Charlie. ‘Although in each case, we’re pretty sure it’s a different audience, aren’t we?’

  Kombothekra nodded. ‘We are. And a different audience again from survivor story number thirty-one on the Speak Out and Survive website. The writer of that described four men, two with beards, and three women. And she said they were middle-aged. Kelvey and Freeguard said their audiences were all young men.’

  ‘What about the survivor story from the other website, Tanya from Cardiff?’ asked Simon. ‘If that’s her real name. There was no audience for that rape, was there? That one seems the most different from the others. The only links are the star-of-the-show and warm-up references, and they could be a coincidence, two completely different attackers.’

  Charlie was shaking her head. ‘There was an audience of one. While each of the two men raped Tanya, the other watched. The words “show” and “warm-up” were used—that’s enough of a link for the time being, until we prove it’s unconnected. And photos were taken. Sam?’

  ‘Sandy Freeguard said she was photographed naked and spread out on the mattress. The word “souvenir” was mentioned, as it was to Naomi Jenkins. Prue Kelvey says she thinks she was photographed. She heard clicks that she assumed came from a camera, but the crucial difference in her case was that the mask was never removed from her eyes, not at any point during the attack. The rapist worked that into his act. He seemed angry with her, she said, and kept saying that she was so ugly she had to have her face covered up or he wouldn’t be able to perform sexually.’

  ‘She’s all right,’ said Gibbs. It was the first time he’d spoken since the meeting began. ‘Nothing special, but not a dog.’

  Everyone but Charlie turned to the pictures on the board. She didn’t need to: she’d already studied them in detail and been puzzled by the lack of physical similarities between the victims. Usually, in any crime series of a sexual nature, the scrote had a preferred type.

  Prue Kelvey had a thin, pretty face with a small forehead and dark, shoulder-length hair. Naomi Jenkins had a similar hairstyle, though her hair was wavier and borderline auburn. Her face was fuller, and she was taller. Kombothekra had said Prue Kelvey was only five feet two inches tall, while Naomi Jenkins was five feet nine. Sandy Freeguard was a totally different physical type: a blonde with a square face, and about two stone overweight, whereas Kelvey was skinny and Jenkins was slim.

  ‘Everyone else cares about what’s happened to these women, even if you don’t,’ Charlie told Gibbs, feeling ashamed of him. Sam Kombothekra had frowned at the ‘dog’ comment. Charlie didn’t blame him.

  ‘Did I say that?’ Gibbs challenged her. ‘I’m just saying, Kelvey’s not especially ugly. So there must have been another reason to leave the mask on throughout.’

  ‘Just think before you speak,’ Charlie snapped. ‘There are better and worse ways to put things.’

  ‘Oh, I’m thinking, all right,’ Gibbs said ominously. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. More than you lot.’

  Charlie had no idea what he meant.

  ‘Do we have to listen to you and Gibbs squabbling, Sergeant?’ said Proust impatiently. ‘Continue, Sergeant Kombothekra. I apologise on behalf of my detectives. They don’t usually brawl like toddlers.’

  Charlie made a mental note to forget to remind the Snowman of his wife’s forthcoming birthday. Sam Kombothekra smiled apologetically at her, on Proust’s behalf, she suspected. Instantly, he went up in her estimation. When he’d first arrived, she’d written him off as what, aged fifteen, she and her friends would have called a cuboid. She amended her snap judgement now; Sam Kombothekra was simply polite and well behaved. Later, if they got a moment alone, she would apologise to him for Proust’s rudeness as well as Gibbs’s callous remark.

  ‘Prue Kelvey estimated that she was in the car for about an hour, give or take,’ Kombothekra went on.

  ‘She lives where?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Otley.’

  Proust looked irritated. ‘Is that a place?’ he said. A bit bloody rich, thought Charlie, coming from a man who lived where he did. What did he think Silsford was, Manhattan?

  ‘It is a place,’ said Kombothekra. Another of his habits that had annoyed Charlie when she first met him: answering questions with ‘It is’ and ‘I am’, rather than simply saying, ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s near Leeds and Bradford, sir,’ said Sellers, who was originally from Doncaster, or ‘Donnie’ as he called it.

  Proust’s slight nod indicated that the answer was acceptable, but barely.

  ‘Sandy Freeguard said it could have been an hour or as much as two hours that she was in the car,’ Kombothekra said. ‘She lives in Huddersfield.’

  ‘Which is near Wakefield,’ Charlie couldn’t resist adding. She kept her face totally straight; Proust would never be able to prove she wasn’t being genuinely helpful.

  ‘It sounds as if this theatre where the women were attacked is nearer to where Kelvey and Freeguard live than to Rawndesley, where Naomi Jenkins lives, then,’ said Proust.

  ‘We don’t think Kelvey and Freeguard were attacked in the same place as Jenkins and survivor number thirty-one,’ Simon told him. ‘There was no stage or theatre mentione
d in either Kelvey’s statement or Freeguard’s.’ Kombothekra nodded at this. ‘Both described a long, thin room with a mattress at one end and the audience standing at the other. No chairs, no dinner table. The spectators at Kelvey and Freeguard’s rapes were drinking alcohol but not eating. Freeguard said champagne, didn’t she?’

  ‘A significant difference, then,’ said Proust.

  ‘There are more similarities than differences,’ said Charlie. ‘The line about warming up before the show—that’s consistent across all three cases. Kelvey said the room she was in was freezing cold, and in Naomi Jenkins’s statement, she says her rapist made a point of leaving the heating off until the audience arrived. He taunted her with it. Freeguard was attacked in August, so it’s no surprise she didn’t mention cold.’

  ‘Sandy Freeguard and Prue Kelvey both said the room they were in had a strange acoustic.’ Kombothekra consulted his notes again. ‘Kelvey said she thought it might have been a garage. Freeguard also said the room didn’t seem domestic. She thought it might have been an industrial unit of some kind. She said the walls didn’t look real. The one she could see from the mattress wasn’t solid—she said it was covered with some sort of material, thick material. Oh—there were no windows in the room Freeguard described.’

  ‘Jenkins mentioned a window in her statement,’ said Charlie.

  ‘You thought it was safe to assume Kelvey and Freeguard were attacked in the same place?’ Proust asked Kombothekra.

  ‘I did. The whole team did.’

  ‘Jenkins was attacked somewhere different,’ said Simon with certainty.

  ‘If she was attacked at all,’ said Proust. ‘I still have my doubts. She’s an habitual liar. She could have read those other two survivors’ stories on the rape websites, both posted before hers, and decided to adopt a similar experience as a fantasy. Then later she met Haworth and wove him into the fantasy, first as rescuer, then later, when he understandably got fed up of her and dumped her, as rapist.’

  ‘Very psychological, sir,’ Charlie couldn’t resist saying. Simon grinned and it made her want to cry. Sometimes the two of them shared a joke nobody else understood, and a sense of tragedy that they were not together and probably never would be overwhelmed Charlie. She thought about Graham Angilley, whom she’d left dissatisfied and confused in Scotland, promising to ring him. She still hadn’t. Graham was too silly ever to make her cry. But perhaps that was a good thing, perhaps a less intense relationship was what she needed.

  Kombothekra was shaking his head. ‘There are details in Jenkins’ statement that correspond with details in Kelvey’s and Freeguard’s, things she couldn’t have known about from reading the stories on the Internet. For example, Jenkins says she was made to describe her sexual fantasies in detail and list her favourite sexual positions. Both Kelvey and Freeguard were ordered to do the same. And they were made to talk dirty, talk about how much they were enjoying the sex that was being forced on them while it was happening.’

  Colin Sellers groaned in disgust. ‘I know none of the rapists we meet are real charmers or anything, but this guy’s about the worst I’ve heard of.’ Everyone nodded. ‘He’s not doing it out of desperation, is he, because he’s a sad, screwed-up fucker? He’s planning it from a position of strength, like it’s his favourite hobby or something.’

  ‘He is. Albeit an imagined position of strength,’ said Sam Kombothekra.

  Simon agreed. ‘He has no idea how sick he is. I bet he’d rather be labelled evil than sick.’

  ‘It’s not about sex for him,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s about humiliating the women as much as possible.’

  ‘It is about sex,’ Gibbs contradicted her. ‘Humiliating them’s what turns him on. Or else why do it?’

  ‘For the show,’ said Simon. ‘He wants to draw it out, doesn’t he? Act One, Act Two, Act Three . . . making the women talk about sex in between the actual rapes, a verbal as well as a visual spectacle. It’s all more stuff to pad out the performance. Are these paying audiences, or invited friends?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Kombothekra. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know. It’s one of our biggest and most demoralising failures, not getting this guy. You can imagine how Prue Kelvey and Sandy Freeguard feel. If we can get him now . . .’

  ‘I’ve got a theory,’ said Sellers, looking brighter suddenly. ‘What if Robert Haworth raped Prue Kelvey and Sandy Freeguard, then told both Juliet and Naomi that he’d done so. That’d explain how they both knew the MO.’

  ‘Why did Jenkins lie, then, and say he’d raped her?’

  ‘For the reason she admitted,’ Charlie suggested. ‘She didn’t think we were looking for him hard enough. Once we found him, she planned to withdraw the accusation and she thought the whole thing’d go away. She didn’t bank on us finding out about Kelvey and Freeguard.’

  Simon shook his head vigorously. ‘No way. Naomi Jenkins is in love with Haworth—there’s no doubt in my mind about that. Juliet Haworth might be able to stay with a man who rapes other women, either for fun or profit, but Naomi Jenkins wouldn’t.’

  Proust sighed. ‘You know nothing about the woman, Waterhouse. Don’t be absurd. She’s lied from the word go. Well? Hasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But I think she’s a fundamentally decent person, lying only in desperation . . . Whereas Juliet Haworth . . .’

  ‘You’re being contrary for the sake of it, Waterhouse! You know nothing about either of them.’

  ‘We’ll see what happens with Robert Haworth’s DNA sample, whether it matches up,’ Charlie intervened diplomatically. ‘The lab are on it at the moment, so we should have a result by sometime tomorrow. And Sam’s got a copy of the photo of Haworth to show the two West Yorkshire women.’

  ‘Another similarity between Jenkins’ account of her rape and Kelvey and Freeguard’s accounts is the invitation to a member of the audience to join in,’ said Kombothekra. ‘A man called Paul, in the case of Jenkins. Kelvey said her rapist extended his invitation to join in to all the men present, but he was particularly keen for a man named Alan to get involved. He apparently kept saying, “Come on, Alan, surely you want a go?” And the other men encouraged this, also egging on this Alan character. Same story with Sandy Freeguard, except the man was called Jimmy.’

  ‘And? Did Alan or Jimmy partake?’ asked Proust.

  ‘They didn’t, neither one,’ said Kombothekra. ‘Freeguard told us that Jimmy said, “I’ll play it safe, I think.”’

  ‘When you hear about men like these, you start to mourn the absence of the death penalty,’ Proust muttered.

  Charlie pulled a face behind his back. The last thing they needed was a diatribe from the Snowman about the good old days of hanging. He seized upon any excuse to lament the abolition of capital punishment: a theft of some CDs from HMV in town, nocturnal fly-posting. The inspector’s readiness to wish death upon random civilians depressed Charlie, though she happened to agree with him about the man who had raped Naomi Jenkins, Kelvey and Freeguard, whoever he was.

  ‘Why the differences, then?’ she wondered aloud. ‘It has to be the same man . . .’

  ‘His method evolves with each rape?’ Sellers suggested. ‘He likes his basic routine, but maybe a bit of variety within that makes it more exciting for him.’

  ‘So he made Kelvey and Freeguard undress in the car,’ said Gibbs. ‘To make the drive more fun.’

  ‘Why the change of venue, for Freeguard and Kelvey, and why take the elaborate dinner out of the equation?’ The Snowman barked impatiently. Charlie had been expecting his mood to deteriorate. When there were too many uncertainties, he usually grew ratty. She noticed that Sam Kombothekra was suddenly very still. He’d never met Proust before, never experienced one of his invisible ice installations, and was no doubt wondering why he felt unable to move or speak.

  ‘Maybe the theatre became unavailable,’ said Charlie. ‘Maybe the panto season started and the stage was needed for Jack and the Beanstalk.’ She spoke in a deliberately relaxed wa
y, trying to diffuse the atmosphere; she knew from long experience that she was the only one of the team who could. Simon, Sellers and Gibbs seemed to accept it as inevitable that they would all congeal in the Snowman’s disdain for hours, sometimes days. ‘In Jenkins’ statement, she says her attacker was serving the food as well, in between sexual assaults on her. Survivor number thirty-one alludes to the same thing.’

  ‘So you’re saying he decided to streamline his operation?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Charlie. ‘Think of what Naomi Jenkins described. That must have taken it out of him, don’t you reckon? A kidnap followed by a long drive, multiple rapes, serving a posh dinner to more than ten guests, then a long drive back.’

  ‘It’s possible our man moved to West Yorkshire between the Jenkins rape and the Kelvey rape,’ said Kombothekra. ‘That could explain the change of venue.’

  ‘Or he always lived in West Yorkshire, since Jenkins said her drive was much longer,’ said Sellers.

  ‘Maybe that was a red herring, though, and another part of what made this scrote’s “act” too tiring to sustain long term,’ said Charlie. ‘Maybe he lived in Spilling—and that was how he knew Jenkins, or knew of her—and he drove her round and round in circles to make her think the site of the attack was at the other end of the country.’

  ‘This is just pointless speculation,’ Proust murmured in disgust.

  ‘Has he got a day job?’ asked Gibbs. ‘Does he take time off to kidnap his victims?’

  ‘There’s one thing we haven’t talked about yet,’ said Charlie.

  ‘That sounds unlikely,’ Proust grumbled.

  She ignored him. ‘All the women say their kidnapper knew their names and numerous details about them. How? We need to find out if these women have got anything in common other than the obvious: they’re all successful, middle-class, professional. Naomi Jenkins makes sundials. Sandy Freeguard is a writer—she writes children’s books. Prue Kelvey’s an asylum and immigration lawyer.’