The Moor (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #11)(74)

“It’s Marco,” Phillips said, keeping his voice barely above a whisper. “He’s Samantha’s father.”

MacKenzie looked away quickly, making a show of smoothing out the tablecloth.

“You’re sure? Of course, you’re sure,” she muttered, answering her own question. “What did he have to say about it?”

“Marco claims that he and Esme had planned to run away together, and that they’d planned to take the baby, too—although he also claims she hadn’t told him it was his. But, when he found out about the note and that she’d disappeared, he assumed she’d abandoned the idea and gone off with someone else. He seemed to have no idea about the baby,” Phillips said. “About Samantha, that is.”

“It would tie in with what she told us, during the session with Alex,” MacKenzie said. “She spoke of her mum having packed two bags: a black rucksack, and a pink baby changing bag. That would suggest she planned to leave with the baby, and with Marco.”

“What else did she say?” Ryan asked.

Just then, Gregory returned.

“Sam’s happily set up with Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” he said. “It was the closest thing I could find.”

“How did it go, during the session?” Ryan asked.

“She did incredibly well,” Gregory said, pulling up a chair. “We managed to draw out quite a bit of detail which will hopefully be of some use to the investigation. She’s a bright child, and she’s been through a lot, so it took some time until she could let her mind go, but we got there in the end.”

MacKenzie had taken a note of everything during the session.

“Samantha described the monster as having a red body, which made me think of Charlie’s coat, at first,” she said. “But it could have been any kind of costume. We’d need to go back and check what people were wearing during the show in 2011, which may be a bridge too far.”

Ryan nodded.

“She talked about there being two bags, as I said, and she mentioned the ‘white hands’ again. This time, she was clear about them being gloves. White cotton gloves, with little grips on the underside.”

Ryan felt something skid inside his chest, because he’d seen those gloves somewhere before.

“What about the gender? Was it a man or a woman?”

“She couldn’t say for certain, but she did say their hands were big enough to wrap around her mother’s throat.”

Ryan knew that, statistically, a handspan like that tended to suggest a male assailant, but it could have been any of the people he had in mind.

“The gloves,” he muttered, and brought out his smartphone. “He was wearing them on the camera footage, but he wasn’t wearing them when he came out of the caravan again.”

“Who wasn’t? What gloves?” Phillips demanded.

“Marco,” Ryan told him. “He wears white gloves with tiny grips on the underside, all the acrobats do. They’re different to the plain ones that Charlie wore, or Duke, for that matter. I need to check…”

He brought up an e-mail containing the CCTV footage as an attachment, and played it on the screen of his mobile.

The others waited, and then Ryan smiled fiercely.

“He has the gloves on as he walks towards Charlie’s caravan, beneath the ticket office,” he said. “But when you scroll ahead to when he stumbles out again, supposedly horrified by what he’s found, his hands are bare.”

He looked up as pieces began to fall into place.

“It’s been smoke and mirrors, all along,” he said, and felt a hard burst of anger at the thought of how they’d all been duped. “Phillips, check the inventory from Charlie’s caravan to see if a pair of white gloves were recovered. In fact, there should be at least two pairs: one plain set, belonging to Charlie, and one set belonging to Marco which he’ll have hidden in plain sight, probably amongst Charlie’s other gloves or in a white sock drawer. If you can’t see it on the list, call Faulkner and ask him to send a team back down to look at Charlie’s caravan again. We need those gloves, because they’ll have the gunshot residue all over them.”

Phillips nodded, but still hadn’t quite caught up.

“I still don’t see how he could have got into the caravan, if it was locked—”

Ryan shook his head.

“We need to work backwards. Let’s start by thinking about the fatal shot that killed Charlie, that nobody heard. We were led to believe it must have been fired before the fireworks display, but that’s an elaborate piece of showmanship I’ll get to in a moment. If we look at things objectively, the most obvious answer is that the shot didn’t happen beforehand—it was masked by the fireworks display.”

“But Leonie and Marco found the body—”

“No, they didn’t. If we agree that the shot was fired after the fireworks began, that puts Charlie’s death at more like nine-thirty or thereabouts. It means he was still alive when Marco and Leonie arrived at the caravan.”

“I don’t follow,” MacKenzie said. “You’re saying he was disabled, before then?”

Ryan nodded.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. When we looked at the gunshot wound on Charlie’s head, I thought it was strange that the angle of the gun had fired on the right side of his skull, because it’s a hard angle for a right-handed person to achieve, if they’re putting a gun in their own mouth. Then, I started to wonder, if it wasn’t Charlie, why a killer would choose to fire at that angle. What did it achieve?”