‘It’s less painful to talk about it than to think about it, all day, every day,’ said Whitehead. ‘Lucinda wants me to “move on”. We can’t discuss it, it upsets her too much. Harvey, though, he’s on my side. He knows I’m meeting you tonight. He agrees that the guilty person has got clean away with it.’
‘Tyler, you mean?’
‘Oh no,’ said Whitehead. ‘No, no, not Tyler.
Robin was so taken aback she couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘You’re surprised,’ said Whitehead, watching her intently. ‘But when I’ve explained… you know who Chloe Griffiths is?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin slowly, ‘Ian Griffiths’ daughter…’
‘Exactly, yes,’ said Whitehead. He took another gulp of wine. ‘Now, you see, there was something the police never made public – CCTV footage. The police ultimately decided it wasn’t conclusive enough to use, but there was footage of somebody
‘Really?’ said Robin, thinking of the poor quality CCTV footage that had already done nothing but confuse this case. ‘Would you mind if I take notes?’
‘No, no, carry on…’
As Robin took out her notebook and pen Whitehead said,
‘The police looked into it before discounting it as irrelevant. We were told it was very blurry, and there was thick rain that night, which didn’t help, but a figure that looked female moved between the Mazda and the next car, then ducked down out of sight, and the police thought they might have entered the Mazda, but then they decided the person must be just doing up a shoe or something.’
‘What made them check the car park footage?’ asked Robin.
‘They’d got wind of all the rumours that had started up in Ironbridge, about Tyler having tampered with the car, and of course, if it was done anywhere, it must have been in the car park, because they crashed on the way back. Now, Tyler couldn’t have done it. Not only could nobody mistake Tyler for a female, blurred footage or not, he was on the phone over the exact period that person entered the Mazda in Birmingham. The mobile signal confirmed he was speaking from Ironbridge.’
‘D’you know who he was talking to?’ asked Robin.
‘No, but I’m sure the police checked. I know people in Ironbridge said Tyler took off because of the crash, but I know for a fact he’d been thinking about clearing out well before then. I heard him talking to Hugo about leaving.’
‘Did he say he wanted to go to London?’
‘No, just that he wanted a change, but he had transferable skills, you know, he was a good mechanic. Anyway, it clearly can’t have been Tyler who messed with the ABS,’ said Whitehead. ‘Somebody else must have turned it off. We all knew that storm was coming. It was an undetectable way to hurt them. Anyone would have known the journey back was going to be hazardous, especially for a recently qualified driver.’
Robin, who was making notes, was glad of a reason not to look Whitehead in the eye. She hadn’t needed this encounter to learn that even the most intelligent people may be blinded by their passionate desire not to look facts in the face. Hugo had been refused the use of the family Range Rover on the night of his fatal accident. His family must have wondered whether he mightn’t have survived, had he only been driving that.
‘I can see why people were saying Tyler did something to the car, that he’d faked being ill that night, because, of course, it was his Mazda – he’d have keys. But Chloe and Tyler were friends – she could have pinched them, or had a second set cut without his knowledge. She hung around with him at his garage sometimes, so she could have asked how to fiddle with an ABS system.’
Robin opened her mouth to speak, but Whitehead ploughed on.
‘Now, Tyler’s friends and his grandmother thought
‘I’ve been told,’ said Robin cautiously, ‘that he was jealous, that Anne-Marie was his former girlfriend?’
‘No, no, that was years previously,’ said Whitehead, waving the idea away with a large white hand. ‘When they were both sixteen or something. There was no question of him being angry about