CHAPTER 26
In the end I went home quite late to my digs, but I managed to get a text off to Mam.

Watch news tmrw. Got big result. Can’t say more. You’ll know it when see it.

Sammy wanted us all back in for eight, and I managed quarter past the hour, my whole body aching as if I had kept fighting in my sleep, and come second. A couple were in before me, but I wasn’t the last one to arrive. Alun looked even more rumpled than he usually did, so I assumed he had spent the night in the LIO’s room, and both Ellen and Rob were sporting black eyes. I had clearly been lucky.

Sammy was pristine, and chirpy with it, the sod.

“Morning, all! Now, the brief will be in at oh nine hundred, and it is indeed one brief”

Ellen called out “What about conflict of interest, boss?”

“That’s for the shyster to decide, mate. Here’s the thing: it ain’t the on-call bod, the duty solicitor. They’ve got a private law firm doing the twisting and wriggling for them. Apparently, two of them have a relative with money, a local councillor, and he’s stumping up for it. Be aware he is also raising merry hell with the brass, so sweet and sensitive in the interviews”

He let that one sit for a few seconds before grinning. “No, fuck it. Get them shitting themselves properly. It’ll be no surprise to you that people in the nick have been going above and beyond for us all night and, among other things, we have bite impressions and comparisons, including matches for Hansen and Jamie Evans, and a statement from Customs down to the airport”

Blake was smiling at that one, so I slapped his arm as Sammy continued.

“DC Sutton has a brother there, apparently It is in the nature of their work, my friends, that they deal with drugs, and while we still need proper forensic statements on the contents of Hansen’s little box of delights they have told us what the drugs are with their field test kit. We have Hansen’s prints on the box as well, and inside it amphetamine, cocaine and crack. And more of his fingerprints. And DNA, oh dear me”

Ellen’s turn. “Hasn’t SOCO been to bed yet?”

“No, not at all. People are really pulling hard for this one, and my lot are being a lot less free with words like ‘woodentops’ for their uniformed colleagues. Oh, and Dyfed-Powys have already interviewed Adele Hughes, Hansen’s cohabitee. The one who threw the teapot. She has given chapter and verse about his dealing, where he gets the gear, the whole thing. Even if we don’t get him for the rapes and assaults, he’s going inside”

I had my own question. “Do you think, really think, he’s going to get off on that lot?”

Once again I saw the savage grin he had never shown when I was working in CID.

“No, I don’t think so, but that is up to you lot. Make sure you stitch them all up right proper. I mean, interview them effectively and coherently so as to properly gather evidence in order to establish their culpability or otherwise”

He waited for the laughter to die down again, and I put my hands up for quiet.

“Mates, I have an issue with the interviews. It’s the two bent ex-coppers, Bob Evans and Dai Pritchard. I have previous with them, so I need to stay away”

Sammy and Blake both gave me level stares, and then Sammy nodded.

“OK. Take one of the others—lad sat next to you, aye? You do the others. I want consistency here, I suspect two of them will go no comment, Diane’s two friends that is, so that will give us spare time to go through all the other evidence and tackle disclosure and the other crap, as well as get full statements out of the way. Di, you and---Blake? Blake. You and Blake sit down with me, and we’ll sort tactics. The two girls? Er, you know what I mean. Candice, is it? Ellen? You do the two shits from out West. They’ll go no comment, as I said, so I am sorry if I am teaching you how to suck eggs, but take them through everything, then special warning, I put it to you, back of a van, with others, beating a lad to shit, all that. Oh yes…”

He looked round the room once more. “You will want to ask Dai Pritchard what the fuck he was doing with handcuffs and works leg restraints in his Range Rover”

He turned away to check the urn for hot water.

“Oh yes, and I will be doing a run up to the greasy if anyone wants anything, before I settle down to tackle timelines and disclosure schedules. Yes, I know, but I want nothing wrong with this one, and I am not afraid to get dirty hands. I’ll give you a heads up when the brief’s done his bit, then I think it’s Hansen and Pritchard first”

Blake sat by me as I started on the paperwork we needed for the interviews.

“Di?”

“Yes?”

“I am going to take a bit of a punt here, but please don’t shout me down. And answer me only if you want to. Pritchard and his mate: you met them just like Elaine’s sister did. Am I right?”

Police, professional, DC Owens. I kept my eyes down.

“Yes. Exactly the same way”

“But you’re not… you’re not a… Are you?”

“No, Blake. All girl, me, from birth”

“Ah. Sorry”

He was silent for a few seconds as I wondered how much I should tell him.

“Di?”

“Yes?”

“How old were you?”

“Barely sixteen, Blake”

“Who was it?”

“That arsehole I believe is paying for the brief. That’s it, OK? No more talk on this one”

He squeezed my shoulder, nodding. “I have a phone call to make, girl. In private”

Eleven o’clock saw us into the first interview, Hansen’s, and I could smell the money coming off the brief. I went through the preliminaries.

“Good morning Mister Hansen. I am DC Owens, and this is DC Sutton. We shall be conducting an interview which will be tape-recorded, and at the end of the interview we shall seal one of the tapes in your sight. You and your representative can have your own copies, and that will be explained formally on the tape”

“Yeah, I know the score, like”

I made sure they had all their needs sorted, toilet, refreshments, then showed them the sealed packs of tapes before putting them into the machines.

“There will be a loud noise as I switch on, but that is to allow the blank part of the tape to spool through. Ready?”

I clicked the tapes in and pressed the starter, and after the beep had finished “This is an interview of… it is being conducted in… the date is… the time by my watch is… present are… can you state your name please? I must remind you that you are under caution, and that you do not have to say anything…”

“Good morning, Mr Hansen. We are here to talk about the events leading up to your arrest last night while driving a white Ford Transit van”

I gave the licence plate number. “Is it your van, Mr Hansen?”

“No”

“You were driving it, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, for someone else”

“Who?”

“Jamie Evans”

“What was your job?”

“I’m a taxi driver”

“No, Mr Hansen. Perhaps my question was unclear. What was your role in the group of people we stopped in the van last night?”

“He said just to drive, not look in the van, innit? Just a driver, me”

“When we stopped the van, there was a young man in the rear. He was bound, and had been beaten badly. What do you know about that?”

“Don’t know nothing”

“You didn’t hear anything coming from the rear of the van? The load compartment?”

“Minding my own business, innit”

“OK. Now, that van was also at a lane near the Crossways hotel. We have a quantity of forensic evidence to show that”

“Not me”

“Another young man was found at the site, also beaten. He had been raped”

“Don’t know anything about that, do I?”

“OK. Mr Hansen, on…”

I rattled through the preamble to the Special warning, the solicitor’s eyes hard on mine.

“A used condom was found in a wheely bin a short distance from where the victim was found. DNA analysis of the item shows it to have that of the young man on its outside, and on its inside there is a match for your own DNA. I am now requiring you to account for that. If you fail to do so, a judge may direct the jury to draw such conclusions as appear proper to them”

The solicitor looked up again from his notepad. “I advise my client not to answer that question”

Just before he said that little formality, I clearly heard him mutter something else, and it was ‘Oh fuck”

I added “And your bite impression matches bites on the shoulders of two male victims of serious assault. Same warning”

Advised not to answer? The scrote began a rambling, whining series of excuses, all about how his partner was a junkie, and he wasn’t thinking straight, and, and, and, as his brief kept advising him, politely, to shut the fuck up.

Blake smiled, leaning forward ever so slightly.

“Your partner be Adele Hughes?”

“Yeah”

“We searched your house, Mr Hansen, and recovered a number of items, which initial tests suggest are cocaine, crack cocaine and amphetamine sulphate”

“Yeah, that’s Adele’s, right junkie, done my head in!”

“The thing is, Mr Hansen, Adele not only says it’s all yours, but she told our colleagues where you get it from”

The solicitor sagged, and as Blake added “And the box holding the drugs has your fingerprints on it and inside it”, the suit’s head went into his hands.

‘Oh fuck’, indeed. There wasn’t much else to hit him with, so we left him with his brief to consider his plea, after doing the business with the tapes.

The solicitor was out reasonably quickly, and Candice and Ellen rattled through two completely ‘no comment’ interviews, exactly as Sammy had predicted. Once the brief was free again, amazingly still officially seeing no conflict of interest, I asked Blake who we should do next.

“The gobby Evans, girl. Get the crunchy ones done as soon as. I suspect the pissy one is going to be hard work”

“Mate, I am surprised that brief is till doing this on his own”

“Grab a brew?”

We ducked into the little tea room, and he shut the door.

“I have thoughts on that one, Di. He is being paid by their relative, innit? Well, I think they’ve cut their losses. He can see where this is going, so why waste time and money on more than one brief? Now, Jamie Evans. Where are you starting?”

“Why do I start?”

“Because you do sweetness and light, and you are fucking evil with it. I do bombshells, and it helps keep me from laughing if I have my gob shut”

I grinned, and he gave me a one-armed hug.

“Ring your Mam after, let her know you’re fine”

“Yes, Dad!”

Jamie Evans was a twat, as expected, and wouldn’t shut up even as his solicitor kept advising him to do so, finally giving up as I detailed the DNA from the hedge, and the tyre prints and paint scratches tying it to Omar’s attack. In the end, as he sat there with a mass of dressings on his face from what he told us clearly and profanely were a broken cheekbone and nose, the brief gave up and sat with his arms folded.

“That fucking bitch hit me in the fucking face! I want her fucking done1 She can’t do that1 I’m going to have her fucking done!”

Blake smiled, and once again leant forward, only slightly, but Evans jerked backward in obvious fright.

“Mr Evans”

“Yeah?”

“The Inspector gave clear instructions before the arrest, and she was complying with them. Those instructions were not to damage any teeth, for bite impression evidence. That is why she left you yours as you attacked her. I was right next to you when you did that. Now, I will give you a special warning, as the law requires, but it will be so that you can explain, for the benefit of the tape, why your teeth seem to have bitten into the shoulders of at least four victims of serious assault. Now, that special warning…”

Once again, we left another owner of a twitching sphincter with his solicitor, and I burst out laughing once we were in private after doing the formalities with the Custody Sergeant.

I realised Blake was staring at me.

“What?”

“You know more about the last one, don’t you?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, I do. I don’t want to tread on Lainey’s toes, mate, but, well, what do you know about her sister?”

“Gossip says she wasn’t always a girl”

“Well, I am pretty sure she always considered herself one, but, well, yeah. She was seeing this Joe Evans, and as Lainey says she dumped him, he groped her and found some bits he wasn’t expecting. Beat the crap out of her, and she goes to hospital. Bob and Dai there, they turn up, out of fucking area, because they are Dyfed-Powys and not South Wales, so someone has given them a shout. Same with me, yeah? Bob is Joe’s uncle. The one who… me…”

He stepped forward, and I let him hug me.

“The one who raped me was Ashley Evans, a councillor, and I got the same treatment. Go home, whore, shut it, we know where you live. Sarah, Elaine’s sister, yeah? She sued, and they folded. Big pay-out”

I had my head on his chest, so I could hear the breath sighing in and out.

“So you’ve been after these bastards for over a decade”

“Yeah. Suppose it’s why I joined up”

“Di, it’s over now. For you both, innit? You and Elaine. Time to get on with life”

I gave him a squeeze before stepping away.

“Still got one to do, mate”

“Yeah, Di. And then we go after the other one”