The Sister(123)

Kennedy mumbled something Tanner couldn’t quite catch.

‘Sorry, sir, you said something?’

‘Don’t tell me, Tanner. It was my missing baseball.’ What the f*ck is happening to me?

Clearing his throat, Tanner said, ‘Sir, I know it wasn’t you, but it would be easier if you did have an alibi.’

Kennedy bristled. ‘Of course I haven’t, and I don’t have one for the first incident either!’ His bluff face reddened. ‘I live on my own and I don’t go out much with anybody else. I don’t have an alibi for about two hundred nights of the year!’ He grabbed his jacket, putting it on as he started walking out of his office. ‘Besides, I'd hardly use a bat with my own initials on it and then continue to attract suspicion by giving the murder a baseball theme, would I?’

Kennedy left without hearing the reply. He didn’t care anymore.

‘No, sir,’ Tanner said to the empty room, but he wasn’t convinced. The DCI could be using the same type of reverse psychology the cleverer criminals used and he’d been acting strange lately. He wasn’t convinced over Theresa either, or the calls she said she’d taken that sounded like him. He’d always suspected the DCI had a secret thing for her. After that motorbike incident, he’d already realised he could have used his own number plates on another bike, but the over-riding question had to be why?





The answer was in his head the following morning. Kennedy had used the alleged caller to manipulate Theresa into doing those things to lay a false trail. So, if he was caught, it would look like a set-up. The final piece of the puzzle fitted when he’d asked her for the Stella Bird file in the guise of the caller. Theresa had told him. ‘The look on his face when he hid that file, John, the way he looked at me for a reaction, knowing how desperately I needed it. I almost gave the game away, but that was when I knew he had to be the caller.’

‘Did he say anything after that?’

‘No, but when he rang – knowing I couldn’t get the file because he already had it – he used it to try to blackmail me into sleeping with him.’

Tanner knew he had no choice but to take it higher, yet some little thing niggled at him. Unless he wore a mask, Theresa would have known it was him and would Kennedy really do all this, just to screw Theresa?

He decided not to do anything about it until the morning, when he’d had the chance to speak to Kennedy further.





Chapter 108



9:05 p.m. 3 April – Passover.





Miller arrived late for his Passover dinner speech. A traffic snarl coming out of London had held him up, but he arrived with a few moments to spare. En route he’d kept in constant touch with the school captain, a gangly spotty-faced youth with bright, intelligent eyes who'd met him at the school entrance, and then escorted him into the hallway down the central aisle through the dining tables.

‘You’ll be sitting there,’ the captain informed him, pointing at the vacant place setting as they passed his allocated table. Miller noticed the roll and butter was still intact and wondered if it would last for the duration of his talk. Old friends ribbed him as he made his way through, and he responded by cocking a finger gun and pointing it at them as he walked by.

Nervous, because he hadn’t delivered a lecture since his ill-fated series on the supernatural the year before, he’d have loved to have had a few minutes to run through his notes, but there was no time. As he followed him up the five steps onto the stage, the hollow thud of their footsteps echoed into the void beneath. Every year at the annual event triggered a different set of memories.

Aware of the captain introducing him at the lectern, he slipped into autopilot. It was a strange feeling. He felt as if he were looking down on himself from the rafters.

The short applause dissipated. He cleared his throat. The microphone picked up the sound, relaying it around the hall. Ripples of laughter reached his ears. The fear he may be about to blush, erythrophobia, bubbled beneath the surface, a fear of manifesting the problem that afflicted his mother all her life. Don’t think about it. A flush of heat formed a film of perspiration on his forehead. The thought of breaking into a sweat made him more nervous, part of him screamed: Say something!

Banishing all conscious thought, he allowed instinct to take over.

Miller leaned on his right elbow and smiled, making it appear the long pause was intentional. His gaze swept the hall and, as he began to speak, a serious expression replaced the smile.

‘When I was young and growing up, it seemed the world wasn’t such a dangerous place. I’m sure, gentlemen, you read the same news in the papers as I do, hear the same news as I do, and if you are anything like me, you probably wonder what kind of a world we are living in today. What are we coming to?’

A murmur of agreement rolled around the hall. Miller sipped from a glass of water and scanned the crowd.

‘If you are the same as me, you probably worry about the state of the world our children are set to inhabit as this twenty first century unfolds.’ Both hands gripped the sides of the lectern firmly as he looked around the hall, engaging with his audience.

‘If what I’m about to say disturbs you, I apologise in advance. In today’s society, we cosset and care for our children on the one hand and then think nothing of allowing them out into the wide-open spaces of the internet from the privacy of their bedrooms, with little control, or supervision. Our children are ill equipped – because they’re not ready for it – to deal with the predators that stalk the pages of cyberspace, dressed up like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, hiding behind fake photographs and false identities. If we allow the media and other entities to continue to encourage our children to grow up too soon, we’ll be taking part in an experiment the likes of which...’ He looked down at the ledge behind the lectern, picked up the water jug and topped his glass up, before continuing, ‘the likes of which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.