Slow Slicing (DI Bliss Book 7)

by Tony J. Forder

  ‘It was called Death By A Thousand Cuts—’

  ‘By Brook, Bourgon and Blue,’ Bliss interrupted. ‘I’m aware of it.’

  Bannister seemed surprised. ‘So you’re also familiar with its subject matter?’

  ‘Yes. And I can see why it stuck with you both. If I’m reading things correctly, you two decided to keep this to yourselves while you were still working on your story, but when a third discovery came into play, you felt you had to at least discuss the wider implications with me.’

  Nodding, Bannister said, ‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’

  All the interlinking parts snapped together inside Bliss’s head. Infuriated and unable to contain his emotions, he leaned further forward and made slits of his eyes. ‘Let me get this straight. Since before those scraps of flesh were discovered around the corner from here, you’ve been aware of this man having gone missing in mysterious circumstances. After we became involved, at which point you must have heard and seen our appeal for information in respect of a missing male adult – an appeal which, as I recall, your newspaper ran – you still kept all this to yourself until today, despite the second find becoming public on Saturday.’

  ‘Yes. That sounds about right.’

  ‘You withheld vital information you must have considered relevant from a police investigation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That is unacceptable!’ Bliss snapped, slamming his fist down on the table. He shot to his feet and began pacing by his chair, his eyes burning into hers. ‘What the hell were you thinking? I can understand why you might have failed to bring this to our attention when you first looked into it, but from the moment that slice of human flesh was discovered – what, twelve days ago now – you must have known there was every chance of it being connected to this Ben Carlisle bloke.’

  ‘Please don’t raise your voice at me, Inspector. I won’t be intimidated by you.’

  ‘Oh, so it’s “Inspector” now, is it? You want to play it that way, do you? In that case, let me tell you, Ms Bannister, I have no intention of trying to intimidate you. My anger is both genuine and justified. You kept information from us, from an ongoing investigation. Why? To further your own narrow cause with a story?’

  Bannister glared at him. ‘My actions were not unacceptable, and your anger is not justified. I refute both of those statements. You want to know why I kept this from you until now?’

  ‘Yes. Please do regale me with all of your meaningless journalistic platitudes. And try to make it sound different to the claptrap I’ve heard so many times before from you people.’

  ‘There’s no need to be quite so hostile.’ Bannister stared up at him. There was anger in her eyes, but he saw that his venomous attack had wounded her.

  Bliss reeled it back in, biting down on a retort. ‘Okay. You win. Just tell me. Tell me why you held this information back.’

  ‘Because it’s my job. It’s that simple. I am a journalist. I had a story. And I didn’t know for sure if it had anything to do with the case you’re working on until I heard about the second find on Saturday.’

  ‘And yet today is Tuesday. What have you been doing for the past three days?’

  Bannister planted her hands flat on the desk in front of her as she stood up. ‘Haranguing my editors to get them to agree to this conversation, you bloody stubborn man.’

  His breath coming in short, laboured pants, Bliss thought it through. Bannister keeping the story in-house until this point came as no real surprise. She made a living as an investigative reporter, and she was better at her job than most. She would not have wanted to come to him with anything less than clear evidence – if she approached him at all ahead of publication. He was not angry with her, despite his outburst. It was the situation he disliked, the rules allowing newspapers to keep the police in the dark if the story called for it. Bannister, however, clearly had more to say, and so he decided to give an inch.

  ‘We’re off the record as of now, right?’ he said, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘If you prefer.’

  ‘I do. But I have to hear the words.’

  ‘Very well. Off the record.’

  They both retook their seats. Bliss calmed himself before speaking again. ‘The whole Lingchi thing occurred to me, too. That’s the proper name for the death by a thousand cuts, or slow slicing, in the book you mentioned. But it came to me after the third discovery, at Tower Hill. From the little I’ve read, I gather the art is in removing as many pieces of flesh as possible without killing the victim. However, major parts may also be removed when death is near, the challenge stepping up a notch as it approaches the end.’

  Bannister shuddered. ‘It’s horrific. Barbaric.’

  ‘We humans did enjoy indulging our baser instincts in those days. These days, too, it seems. So tell me, what eventually made you decide to bring me into this?’

  ‘Well, now, this brings me back to Freddy Swift. One of the crimes he was interviewed about was particularly abhorrent. It involved the brutal rape and murder of a young wife and mother. When I read about the case, I noticed she was thought to have been tortured over a period of time before being dumped. Putting that together with the book in Carlisle’s living room led me to wonder if both men may have had something to do with the murder. It seemed like a crazy coincidence otherwise. Of course, the similarities with the cases you were working on also struck me, but I couldn’t see how they connected at all.’

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘Only my perception of it. In the end, there were too many links for me to ignore between the men, your cases, and the old one I mentioned.’

  ‘Geraldine Price,’ Bliss muttered, his thoughts turning over quickly now.

  Again the look of surprise. Bannister spread her hands. ‘So you already know all of this? I’m telling you nothing new?’

  Bliss shook his head. ‘No, you are. I’m sure we would eventually have come up with the names of both Swift and Carlisle, but it would have taken longer. You can imagine what the record-keeping was like in the nineties, with computerisation and all that entailed. In fact, that’s what I was looking into when you called. Many notes and statements will have failed to make it into those records, so at the moment we’re relying on memory as much as anything else. You’ve saved us days of trawling through data. Did you know Conway, the SIO in Wiltshire, was on the Geraldine Price investigation?’

  ‘No. That’s news to me, I must admit. Our focus so far has mostly been on Carlisle’s disappearance.’

  ‘So, you argued the toss with your editors, and they stalled. But a third connected case, allied with your own findings, eventually tipped the balance in our favour.’

  ‘Yes. With, I like to think, a little bit of persuasion from me.’

  Bliss debated how much to reveal. Off the record or not, there were limits to what he felt comfortable discussing with a journalist. He trusted Bannister more than any other, but not enough to put his complete faith in her integrity. He opted not to tell her about the figures carved into the pieces of flesh, as this was a detail deliberately withheld from the media so far. It felt like the right card to hold back for a later date.

  ‘There’s still a great deal of confusion at the moment,’ he said. ‘We’ve locked into a joint task force, involving my team, a unit from Swindon, and now the City of London police. A DI by the name of Max Riseborough is running things down there, and although the three of us have a professional overlap, we’re not exactly sure how it all fits together, or even if it does at all. I’d be interested in hearing anything else you have, though.’

  They talked for a further forty minutes, both having reeled in their emotions. Bliss apologised for his earlier outburst, and left with a promise from Bannister that she would send him all of her research, but no guarantee as to when her own article would appear either online or in print. They discussed the possibility of reachin
g an amicable agreement on a deadline, but he felt his own investigation wasn’t sufficiently advanced to specify a date, and she did not want to be beholden to the police when it came to doing her job. This he accepted without complaint.

  As he walked across the road to the car park, Bliss’s thoughts vacillated between the information he had garnered from the meeting, and his sense of loss at letting Sandra Bannister’s friendship slip away. Her fierce intelligence fascinated him, and he loved the way her mind worked. She had pulled together multiple strands of information and fashioned them into one stronger thread of knowledge. Doubting the implied coincidence, Bannister had instead focussed on one angle of approach, in much the same way he did when working a case.

  Bliss admired her for that, but his veneration fell flat as the reality of their situation struck home. Theirs was a wholly professional arrangement once again, and if any genuine feelings had existed between them, they were now consigned to history. He suspected their corresponding interests in this case were not over, but he nevertheless felt terrible about causing the rift between them.

  Another burden of guilt he would have to shoulder.

  Nineteen

  ‘So what does it all mean?’ DS Bishop asked after Bliss had thrown the two new names into the mix.

  The team were gathered in the incident room, each updating their colleagues with whatever progress had been made since the morning briefing. JTFO teams from Gablecross and Bishopsgate took part via a secure videoconferencing link. Aware of the attention currently focussed on himself, Bliss was still mentally assembling the answer to his sergeant’s question, straining to find a measure of significance. Their own case having stalled, this fresh impetus was exactly what they had needed; yet he sensed the mood in Major Crimes was more one of frustration than genuine pleasure at the renewed momentum.

  ‘I’m still piecing it together myself,’ Bliss admitted. ‘Assuming these new findings are correct, of the two men, only Freddy Swift was interviewed in connection with the Geraldine Price murder. His friend Ben Carlisle, our man with the dodgy and highly pertinent book, was apparently not spoken to. How does that align with your own recollections, Superintendent Conway?’

  Conway’s image was sharp on the wall-mounted screen, now split fifty-fifty between Swindon and London. He paused for a moment before responding. ‘I’m happy to have my team taking responsibility for digging back through the records, of course,’ he said, ‘but I’m struggling to recall either man, frankly.’

  ‘Perhaps this Swift fellow was interviewed by other members of the squad at the time,’ Riseborough suggested. The picture from London was grainy, but the DI’s concern was apparent.

  ‘That’s always possible,’ Conway conceded. ‘But I would have studied the case files on many occasions, I’m sure, so if Swift was interviewed, it surprises me that I can’t recall the name. I presume he was nowhere close to being a prime suspect – a passing interest at most. Still, provided we confirm the findings, this is a decent lead.’

  ‘Do you think this represents a shift of emphasis for us?’ Chandler asked.

  Though it was not obvious from her tone, she was peeved that Bliss had taken the Bannister meeting alone. He glanced across in her direction, having shared his source only with her so far. ‘In what way, Pen?’

  ‘Well, we were split earlier, between this being an act of revenge or some fellow gangster covering his tracks. This new line of enquiry appears to be leading us down the track-covering route.’

  Bliss had been thinking along the same lines, though nothing he had heard so far was sufficiently potent to pull him one way or the other. ‘The way I see it, this Freddy Swift character being a suspect in the murder all those years ago is merely an extension of what we already knew: that Geraldine Price was likely killed by a handful of deviants who also happened to be villains. Swift being acquainted with Carlisle, a man who happens to own a book on an ancient form of Chinese torture reminiscent of our current cases, is an interesting point. However, it may not be a leading one. It steers us in that direction, I admit, but I don’t want to get so sucked in that we become blinkered.’

  ‘I tend to agree,’ Conway said. Bliss noticed the female detective with whom he had spent Saturday evening nodding in the background. ‘Tell me, Inspector, what kind of follow-up are you looking at?’

  Bliss realised he had no option but to reveal his source. It was a risk, but he had already worked out a way to explain it if asked. ‘My contact is a journalist who owed me a favour. She is sending me all the research she’s gathered so far, and we’ll want to interview both men – or certainly Swift and Mrs Carlisle, if her husband doesn’t show. By that stage I’d expect us to have a clearer vision as to the direction our investigation is going in. With this fresh information, we can’t ignore the strong possibility that the slice of flesh found at the Bishops’ Palace may have come from Ben Carlisle.’ He glanced around the room. ‘Everybody okay with that?’

  ‘We need to make the most of this change of gear, boss,’ Bishop said. ‘It’s a welcome boost, but fillips alone won’t achieve a thing. Your gut is usually a decent guide. What’s it saying to you?’

  Bliss shook his head and switched his attention to DC Gratton. ‘No, we have Phil back with us, so let’s hear from him. It wouldn’t hurt to have a fresh opinion.’

  ‘Boss?’ Gratton spluttered. ‘I… um… er…’

  ‘Brilliant. We need a lot more of your sharp and creative thinking around here.’

  Above the ripple of laughter spreading throughout the room, Gratton said, ‘I’m sorry, boss, but I’ve been a bit out of the loop.’

  ‘That’s true. How have we managed without your searing intellect until now, Detective Constable?’

  ‘I’m not sure, boss. Luck, maybe?’

  Chuckling, Bliss turned back to Bishop. ‘Why don’t you let us in on your own thoughts, Bish? Say you were DI on this right now. Which way would you be leaning?’

  Bishop was unusually circumspect for a big man. Often reserved, he kept his feelings to himself until he was certain the time was right to share them. The spotlight having fallen upon him, he gathered himself decisively. ‘If I had to plump for a single line of investigation, I’d be looking harder at the revenge motive. We’ve heard how Geraldine’s father was a bit of a rogue, and she also had a brother. Then there’s her husband and children to consider. Any of them might want to treat these men like they treated her.’

  ‘But why now?’ Chandler asked. ‘Why wait all these years?’

  ‘Maybe there’s a recent trigger we know nothing about. Something that set one of them off. Perhaps more than one.’

  ‘But how would any of them track these men down?’ Riseborough said. ‘Their fellow villains, I can understand – somebody always knows somebody else in their line of business. But aside from the father, everyone else associated with Geraldine Price has a pretty normal background, from what I can tell.’

  Bishop raked his eyes over a case summary he was holding. ‘Her husband and son are both solicitors. Family business, criminal law. They’d likely have investigators sniffing around. Plus there’s the father, who may be working with either or both. Between them, they’d find enough to obtain a list of names, I’m sure.’

  Bliss took a breath before weighing in. ‘What bothers me about that are the details not in the public domain. The suspicion that slices of flesh were removed from Geraldine’s body before she died was never released to the media, nor to the family. I can understand the desire to replicate Geraldine’s torture and murder on those who carried it out, but how would whoever is responsible know about the specifics?’

  ‘Paid for it,’ DC Ansari said flatly. She shrugged. ‘We all know it happens. You pay the right amount of money to the right person, you acquire the right information.’

  ‘That’s true. Sadly. But I still think the more obvious answer is that whoever is doing this now wa
s also responsible back then. Look, Bish asked me for my gut feeling. The truth is, I’m not sold either way. Both theories are entirely plausible. Which is why, for now at least, I’d prefer we followed both paths.’

  ‘That will put added pressure on our resources,’ Conway argued.

  ‘I realise this represents a change of approach from me, but I think we have enough people on this to cope with two diverse strategies. For another day or so. We have to hope we don’t tread water tomorrow.’

  ‘In which case, how do you propose to divide us up?’

  Bliss had been running through the permutations as he spoke. ‘DS Bishop here is inclined towards the revenge angle, so he and DC Ansari can pay a visit to Andrew and Stephen Price – our two solicitors. As husband and son of Geraldine, either or both are decent candidates for this. One of the first things to find out, of course, is whether either of them was in a position to leave the bag at Tower Hill yesterday morning. We need to talk to them. Get a feel for them, and let’s have statements from both as to their whereabouts during all three time windows – ours, Swindon’s, and the one in London.’

  ‘What about Geraldine’s father and brother?’ Riseborough asked. On screen, he looked dishevelled and weary, as if he’d been up all night. ‘Will you and DS Chandler be taking them?’

  Bliss shook his head. ‘No – I’m leaving them to one of our DCs, Phil Gratton. He can take a uniform with him. Same deal as far as statements and alibis are concerned. DS Chandler and I will take Carlisle and Swift. Before we do, I need to know from Superintendent Conway if he has any further insight relating to the case. For instance, it would be nice to have a transcript of Swift’s interview and a copy of his statement. I reviewed the case file, but I can’t say I noticed his name anywhere in it. I’d also like to know where Carlisle slots in before we talk to his wife.’

  ‘I’m wondering if I should join you, Inspector,’ Riseborough said. ‘I’ll pull together whatever information we gather overnight at our end, but I’m thinking it would be best if we met up and planned a strategy together.’