Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Glad you could make it, DI Pritchard. I’m DCI Riley and this is DS Davis – Dan and Lucy. Good to meet you.’
She shakes my hand brusquely, with an air of authority, or perhaps superiority, though I’ll reserve my judgement for now. Either way though, I’m sure it has helped her move up the ranks as quickly as she has in her by-all-accounts impeccable career to date.
Detective Amanda Pritchard, or Detective Inspector Amanda Pritchard, as it now transpires, was the investigating officer who had interviewed Erin at length following the death of Bojan Radulovic, seven years ago.
She’s currently on CID at Leeds and has agreed to meet us, informally, at a nearby coffee shop.
‘You’re here to talk about the Erin Santos case, aren’t you? About Samantha Valentine? I have to say,’ she says, ‘I was shocked when I saw that name come up again. In truth, it gave me a little chill.’
‘Why’s that, DI Pritchard?’
‘Amanda – and listen, before you say anything more, there’s something I have to say.’ Her expression hardens as she leans in closer, takes a large sip of the hot, strong black filter coffee she’s ordered.
‘Erin Santos was – is – a dangerous woman. She’s a pathological liar and a fantasist. At the time of her arrest she was suffering from delusions, from auditory hallucinations – she thought people were talking to her when they weren’t, and telling her things that weren’t true, seeing people who weren’t really there – that kind of stuff.
She was paranoid and depressed and vulnerable and needed professional help.
’ She blows on her coffee, takes another sip of it.
‘That said, I genuinely believed that Erin genuinely believed that what she was telling us about Samantha Valentine was true at the time, because in her mind it was true. She could present as normal, but she was also cunning and manipulative.’
It’s a pretty damning opening statement and it’s got my attention.
‘Manipulative in what way?’
‘Ways plural, you mean,’ she says. ‘She got under your skin somehow. I know they all do in their own way – the murderers and the abusers and the kiddy-fiddlers and the rapists – but Erin really tugged hard on those heartstrings. The death of her mother at the hands of the abusive stepdad, being let down by the police, her traumatic childhood… all of that,’ – her eyes are still fixed on mine – ‘but it was just an act, Dan. She talked the talk, she told a good story – and she was pretty damned effective at making it sound authentic. Only it isn’t – it wasn’t – true, none of it. ’
I hear the conviction in her voice but there’s something else. She seems a little spooked perhaps.
‘And you’re absolutely sure about that, Amanda?’
She laughs, a touch derisively, though I could just be searching for it.
‘Abso-freakin-lutely.’ She sits back from the table.
‘Did you read her file, her medical history? Erin Santos is a paranoid schizophrenic; she was nuttier than a squirrel’s pocket when she killed Bojan Radulovic.
The previous year, she’d spent a stint in a psych ward after a full-blown, drug-induced psychotic breakdown.
She wasn’t a well woman, which is why she ended up where she did – in Larksmere.
No one ends up in that place of purgatory unless they need to be there, you know that. ’
‘But the stuff about her mother’s death,’ Davis interjects, ‘it was true that she was murdered by her partner in front of Erin when she was a young teenager. And it’s true that numerous 999 calls were made alleging DV assaults over a period of years, all resulting in NFA… She didn’t lie about that either.’
‘Maybe so,’ she shrugs, ‘perhaps this is what contributed to her mental health decline over the years, and maybe it’s why the – very lenient, in my opinion – judge handed out the sentence to her that he did.
But as for Erin’s story about this supposed Samantha Valentine character?
Nah,’ – she shakes her head, erudite – ‘I’m afraid I didn’t buy it.
’ Her eyes dart between us. ‘There was absolutely nothing, not a shred of evidence, to suggest any such person existed. This crime you’re currently investigating, this murder – look at the timing of it.
Erin Santos gets released from the funny farm and, oopsadaisy, there’s an almost identical murder a short time after!
Strange, that.’ She arches her brow. ‘A real coincidence, wouldn’t you agree? ’
Admittedly, she does have a point, and it’s not like we haven’t considered this.
Only, when Tilly Ward claims to have first met Samantha Valentine, Erin was still a patient at Larksmere.
The timing doesn’t quite add up, or not at the moment.
I need to get Erin Santos’s mugshot in front of Tilly Ward lively, see if we get a positive ID from her.
‘And why would she go missing?’ she continues. ‘That’s also why you’re here, right? Ask yourself, why would Erin Santos go on the run now if she has nothing to hide? Innocent people have nothing to hide from the police.’
‘Maybe it’s because of the police that she’s hiding.’ I put it out there. ‘Maybe she believes history will repeat itself. Perhaps she thinks she’ll be blamed or framed for this murder too.’
She looks up from her coffee, sharply.
‘What do you mean, “too”? You think we bungled the original investigation, is that what you’re saying, DCI Riley?
You think Erin Santos is telling you the truth?
’ She has the tiniest smirk on her face now.
‘Erin confessed to stabbing Radulovic, she admits to sticking a knife through his heart and killing him.’
‘Actually, reading through all the statements and recordings from the interviews, she confessed to killing Ari Hussain, not Radulovic,’ I correct her. It may sound as if I’m being pedantic, but this distinction is important.
‘There’s no evidence to link Santos back to our crime, currently.
And our suspect has also confessed to killing our victim.
But the MO is more or less the same,’ I explain.
‘She acted in self-defence, she was defending her friend, Samantha Valentine, against her abusive boyfriend, Milo Harrison. Besides,’ I continue, ‘Erin was at her address, here, in Leeds, when the incident took place. She has an alibi.’ I’m not entirely sure why I tell her this when I suspect Malcolm may have lied – perhaps it’s her slight arrogance. It’s beginning to grate on me.
‘Tell me, Dan, how does a fully grown adult female simply vanish off the face of the earth?’ There’s a definite facetious tone now.
‘Santos claimed Valentine was at the scene of the crime when the incident happened. Here one moment and then – pouf – gone the next, never to be seen again! No record of her anywhere, no sightings, no social media, nothing that suggested she existed? I’ll tell you why, shall I?
’ She leans forwards again. ‘Because she doesn’t exist – it’s as simple as that.
’ She taps a clean, neat fingernail on the table in emphasis.
‘Why wasn’t it looked into properly at the time, Erin’s account of what happened?
Aside from basic intel, her story was largely dismissed.
But I’ve been through the statements, Amanda.
’ I match her gaze. ‘I’ve read them, word for word.
If it turns out to be true, and we go on to find Samantha Valentine, then there’ll be an inquiry and you’ll have to explain why so many things slipped through the net, why so much of what Erin said, repeatedly, over and over in great detail, was never thoroughly investigated or followed up at the time. ’
Her smirk has now dissipated into a grim, thin line.
Something like this could prove to be a stain on her exemplary character if she turns out to have been wrong, and she knows it.
Do I now detect a hint of doubt? Judging by her record, Amanda Pritchard is a good detective – no doubt there – and I’m not here to call her professional judgement into question as such, but we can all make a mistake, a bad call sometimes. We’re not robots – not yet anyway.
‘That artist’s sketch you released to the media, it looks a lot like Santos – as soon as I saw it, I thought of her.’ I feel as if she’s playing this like a game of chess now, like somehow being ‘right’ is more important than the facts.
Personally, I’ve not yet met Erin Santos in the flesh, but I have seen her photograph, taken at the time of her arrest, and while I can’t deny that there may be some similarities between her photo and Tilly’s sketch if you look for them, I couldn’t say with any kind of conviction that it was an accurate likeness at all.
‘Erin had dark hair, didn’t she? I thought Samantha was a blonde? Both Erin and our suspect agree that her hair is blonde.’
‘Is?’ She smirks again, her eyebrow twitching. ‘I never forget a face, Dan, not least a murderer’s. And I said “thought of her”, not positively identified her.’
‘You said “it looks a lot like Santos”.’
‘Well, I should imagine she’s changed a bit over the years, like we all do, even if we haven’t been locked away in the loony bin, but like I say, as soon as I saw the sketch, her name came into my head – and she could’ve dyed her hair, obviously.’
‘But you’re not certain it’s her?’
She exhales, checks her watch as if this is all growing tedious and she needs an escape.
‘“No” would have to be the answer to that, Dan,’ she says flatly. ‘I can’t say for certain.’
‘Why do you think Erin targeted Bojan Radulovic in the first place? What was her motive for killing him? No connection was ever established between the two of them. Erin says she’d never met him in the flesh until the day she killed him.’
‘I think she was lying,’ Pritchard says with a degree of conviction. ‘I believe that she did know Bojan Radulovic. She probably knows your new victim too.’
‘But there was no evidence of that – of her knowing Radulovic prior?’
She holds my gaze.
‘No. Just a hunch.’
‘I know Erin had historic mental health issues, but she also had no previous history of violence and was lucid, cognisant and communicative at the time of her arrest, wasn’t she?’
‘Yep,’ she agrees, nodding, ‘she was all of those things, and perhaps you could include articulate, amenable and recalcitrant to that list as well, if you like. Look, you can use whatever fancy words you want, but just because she wasn’t barking at the moon doesn’t mean she wasn’t insane, or capable of committing murder and attempting to cover it up with an elaborate piece of fiction.
’ She fidgets, a touch agitated in her seat and knocks back some more coffee.
‘The truth is, I don’t know exactly why she targeted Radulovic.
Of course, she told us at the time that she believed he was someone else. ’
‘Ari Hussain, Samantha Valentine’s fiancé.
Erin said she’d never met him, yet she seemed to know an awful lot about him – or the “him” she believed he was.
She knew where he lived, she knew how old he was, his birthday – even his star sign – Pisces, in case you’re interested.
’ Though judging by her expression, I suspect that she isn’t.
‘She correctly named his mother, the company where he worked, and she identified a car that she believed was his. There was a lot of detail in her statements, don’t you think, a wealth of information? ’
‘Yes.’ She nods. ‘Like I say, she was extremely good at creating fiction, it was all just a narrative that she concocted. I don’t know her exact motive, but I suspected that she was most likely stalking Radulovic.
I thought that maybe they’d had some sort of tryst, a brief sexual encounter – Erin was a young, attractive woman, if I remember – and she became obsessed with him, fixated upon him.
My theory is that he probably realised fairly quickly that she was a complete wacko and no doubt tried to distance himself.
Her psychopathy, however, was such that she couldn’t allow a rejection like that to go unpunished, so she killed him. ’
I think of Milo Harrison’s neighbour then, the witness who mentioned something about him being harassed by a woman he’d had a one-night encounter with, and the CCTV I saw of the hooded person I felt sure was female, that flash of blonde hair. Could it actually have been Erin Santos?