Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
“I’m not under arrest, though, am I?’
I sat back in the chair, arms folded, eyes fixed on Neil Hunt. He looked more like a boxer dog than a person, even if he wasn’t drooling like one.
“Not yet.” Wrigley leaned onto the desk between us and Hunt, looking rather like a sedate old grandad. This was his standard interviewing pose; unthreatening, mild, slightly more interested in a pint in his local after a walk with the dog.
Wrigley didn’t have a dog. Pam wouldn’t allow it.
He also didn’t have a local, which had nothing to do with Pam and everything to do with Wrigley preferring to take a taxi to his favourite cricket club, half an hour away, knowing the importance of keeping his job away from his actual life, not that there was always much difference.
Wrong career for that.
“No, son, you’re not under arrest. It may or may not stay that way depending on whether you killed your girlfriend or not.
If you did, I will find out and arrest you.
If you didn’t, well, I need to find a way to prove that, and to do that, I need you to tell me where you were on Monday evening, March thirtieth, and all-day Tuesday, and ideally I need to know where I can find proof of where you were and who you were with.
Make my life easy, son. Even if you were doing something you shouldn’t, as long as it doesn’t involve murder or another heinous crime, I don’t really care.
” Wrigley stayed still in the same position, waiting.
I wasn’t there to say anything, really. It wasn’t that I’d been told to keep quiet, quite the opposite, but my task was to watch, to look at Hunt’s body language. Was he lying? Was he upset that his girlfriend was dead? Was he covering something up?
“It’s easy to fit me up for this, though, init?
Easily to blame the bloke and all you lot want is to tie this up then you can get to the pub and get the media off your back.
Well, I didn’t fucking do it, did I? I didn’t even know she’d gone to fucking Manchester.
” He pulled at his hair, hard enough to tug a few bits out.
“I was working away in Newcastle, laying new gas pipes. You can check with my boss, Keith McAndrew, and my mate, Craig Watson. They were with me in Newcastle.”
“You see, Neil, we’re not that bad at our job, and to be fair, we have to be a bit suspicious of you, because usually when a woman is murdered, it’s her partner or her ex-partner who’s done it.
Men sometimes have a bit of a problem with their partners or exes and can’t help themselves.
Don’t understand it myself. My missus – well, you wouldn’t mess with her, and if I’ve pissed her off, I have to sleep with one eye open.
Anyway, the point is, we’ve got a couple of braincells between us – I mean, Detective McAllister here owns two point five of them – see what I did there?
– so we already spoke with Mr McAndrew and Mr Watson, and while they confirmed you were working in Newcastle, they didn’t know where you were between six on Tuesday evening and seven Wednesday morning, which is a bit confusing really.
” Wrigley sat back now and watched; grenade dropped.
“Your room wasn’t slept in either, so where were you?
Were you back in Manchester, Neil? Like I said, I just need that concrete alibi and then we can focus our attentions on something less statistically likely. ”
Neil stared at the desk. “I think I need a solicitor.”
My heartrate should’ve gone up. Asking for a solicitor didn’t always determine that someone was guilty, or maybe they were guilty of something even if it wasn’t what we were investigating, but something was off here.
“How was your relationship with Chelsea?” I decided now was a good time to ask my own questions.
Neil Hunt had been brought in for questioning three hours ago, our colleagues in Newcastle enjoying a quick trip over the Pennines to bring him to us.
They’d already spoken to Keith McAndrew and Craig Watson on our behalf.
Keith confirmed Hunt had been putting in a full day’s work, but hadn’t had reason to see him in the evenings.
Craig Watson, Hunt’s best friend, had happily thrown him under the bus and reversed over him, telling the cops in the North-East that he hadn’t seen Hunt after they’d finished work on Monday evening and he was slightly late the following day, and no, he had no idea where his pal had gone.
Hunt looked up at me, surprised to hear me speak.
“It was alright, I mean, I wasn’t going to be moving in with her or anything like that.
She was hard work.” He looked genuinely upset and I didn’t think he was faking it.
In fact, I was pretty sure that Hunt didn’t have the required number of brain cells to lie.
“Did you row?”
He stared at the wall behind me. The interview room was small and dark and uncomfortable, exactly as it was meant to be.
We’d done all of the usual tricks – kept him waiting, made it look like we’d forgotten about him, offered him the minimum amount of food and drink we had to be compliant and avoid any complaints should he be arrested.
“Yes. A lot. My mate Craig thought I should bin her off, he said she was trouble, and she was. But I did really like her.” He looked about to cry.
“Was she in any debt or trouble herself?” We’d managed to find a fair bit about Chelsea – she was in huge debt but still spending.
Her friendships weren’t strong as she’d borrowed money off them or asked for too many favours, a lot of her bridges had been torched with a furnace.
But so far, no one had motive to kill her.
Apart from Neil Hunt.
“She was always in debt and wanting me to give her a bit to treat herself. I’d said no at the weekend when I saw her last. We had a row and then I left to go to Newcastle for the week.
I came back Friday for the weekend because I had my kids, then left again Sunday night when I dropped them off at their mum’s.
” He rubbed his face. “Look, my ex-girlfriend lives in Newcastle and I stayed with her because her husband was away. She won’t give me an alibi though. ”
I thought he was telling the truth. We could also run his car through the ANPR system, see if it was flagged driving between Newcastle and Manchester at the relevant times, which were broad, thanks to the weather.
Although he might not have used his own car.
“What’s her name and address, Neil?” I asked the question gently. “And is her husband working away this week?”
He shrugged. “No idea. He’s a barrister and he was in court in London all last week.”
“So you’re her bit of rough then, son.” Wrigley stepped back in. “Bit on the side.”
Hunt nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. She wasn’t going to leave her bloke who’s got all that cash for someone like me with a psycho ex and two kids, to live in a council house in Liverpool, is she?”
“Probably not. Would you leave a husband with a well-paying job for this one, Detective McAllister?”
“Unlikely.” Although it wouldn’t be as simple as that because things rarely were. “What’s her name, Neil? We’ll speak to her as discreetly as possible.” Which was something I couldn’t promise, it would depend on the cop doing the asking.
“She’s going to tell you I wasn’t there.” He pulled at his hair again. “So you might as well as arrest me now.”
“Just tell us name son, and maybe her address. All we need is a nearby camera to have picked you up and we can rule you out. Then we stop wasting our time on you and can bring Chelsea’s killer to justice. Unless it was you, the killer that is. Then we’ll bring you to justice.”
That was when Neil Hunt started to cry.