Gayther put his foot down on the accelerator and roared away.
“Which is?”
“How the hell is it that everyone who looks at me knows immediately that I’m the police?”
They both looked at each other and laughed.
11. WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER, AFTERNOON
“This is it then, guv? The Burgess place?” Carrie looked out of the car window at the ramshackle cottage on its own at the bottom of a wooded lane just outside Aldeburgh. “Hansel and Gretel’s old home. Do you think anyone lives there? Just the wicked witch? Look at the state of it.”
Gayther, taking the file out again from beside his seat, surveyed the scene.
A tumbledown building, peeling paint and decay everywhere.
An overgrown garden, full of nettles and weeds.
Beyond that, sparse trees, broken and at odd angles, and mud, lots and lots of churned-up, dried-out mud.
“It’s long past its glory days, Carrie, that’s for sure.” He thought for a second or two. “You know, if Burgess is The Scribbler, those woods and fields beyond will turn out to be his burial grounds.”
“Would he dare, if he did carry on killing? Bring them back home instead of leaving them in ditches far and wide? What if the local authority gave permission to build a hundred homes over there? He wouldn’t take the risk, surely. To look out of his bedroom window one morning to see a crane churning over mud and skulls and bones.”
Gayther shrugged. “Who knows, Carrie, but I’d like to see if we can get Kevin and his cadaver dog out for a walk there some time soon. See what Pigflesh can sniff out.”
“Pigflesh, guv? Kevin Pigflesh?”
“The dog, Carrie,” Gayther laughed. “Kevin called it Pigflesh because that’s how he started training it when it was young. To find bits of pig flesh.”
Carrie looked back towards the woods and fields. “Imagine being here at twilight with the mist rolling in. Proper creepy, it is. A Halloween nightmare.” She shuddered and Gayther wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not.
He looked across at the bleak landscape.
A First World War no-man’s land. Imagined the horrors that might be buried out there in shallow graves.
Decided she was not.
“According to Cotton’s notes,” Gayther said, looking down at the papers as he propped them up on his steering wheel, “he has vanished into thin air. Google air anyway. She is now living here on her own. Angela Burgess, wife, or possibly former wife, of Simon Burgess.”
“The ungodly creature to be burned to ashes,” mumbled Carrie. “Hansel and Gretel.”
“Well, possibly. To recap, she wrote to the police in Suffolk when she was living with him in Sussex and he was coming up once or twice a month to deliver baby goods to little shops. She said he was The Scribbler; that he used to make her dress up as a schoolboy and then forced her to have anal sex with him.” He grimaced. “I can’t help thinking of Jimmy Krankie whenever I read that bit.”
“Jimmy Krankie, guv?”
“It’s Friday, it’s five to five, it’s Crackerjack!?”
“Not with you, guv.”
“Oh, never mind, Jimmy Krankie was a woman who dressed up as a schoolboy and appeared on a children’s television programme called Crackerjack! years ago.”
“Like a transvestite?”
Gayther puffed theatrically … “No, not really … Jimmy Krankie was more of a panto act … oh, never mind.” He then went on.
“Burgess was in the area for each of the murders, even though he spent only a few days a month up in this neck of the woods. So that’s a strong pointer to him. He just happens to be here every time someone’s killed. What are the chances of that if he were an innocent man?”
He coughed and added, “An old boy who talked to The Scribbler on the night one of the victims went missing … Fotherby was the victim … saw the police appeal and the identikit drawing and recognised Burgess. He then, by a sheer stroke of luck, saw Burgess in his van a week later and had the good sense to note the number plate and ring in with it.”
“Well, that’s a good start. So why didn’t we nail him?” Carrie suddenly noticed movement at the upstairs window, a fluttering of a net curtain. Someone was there, looking out, watching them.
“It was a start, yes. And we … they … came close. But they screwed up. They pulled Burgess in and felt he was near to confessing. They got an extension. Left him alone to stew in his own juices and then set up an identity parade.”
Gayther laughed sardonically.
“Big mistake. The old fool who’d talked to Burgess and ID’d him picked out someone else. Unbelievable. It was someone who looked nothing like Burgess – we used to pull them off the streets for a fiver in those days to make up the numbers in a line-up.”
“Uh, not so good. Dead in the water, then?” Carrie kept talking, although she had half an eye on the cottage window. No movement. But the dark shadow to one side could be someone monitoring them, she thought. She looked at it, waiting for the darkness to move.
“It needn’t have been if they’d been cute about it,” continued Gayther. “If they’d let everyone leave the line-up at the same time and taken Burgess back to the interview room, they maybe could have, with a nudge and a wink to imply he’d been picked out, got him to admit to the killings. But they held back the man the old boy singled out as the rest of the line-up left and that seemed to give Burgess the impetus to hold on.”
He flicked through the papers. “And then this clown Halom went to the press, same day, next day, whenever, and confessed, so the focus moved to him as the prime suspect … he had his confession all written out and presented to the newspaper … and Burgess just slipped away into the shadows.”
“What about the car, the Burgess van, whatever it was, what did forensics get out of that?” There was no movement at the cottage window. Just the shadow. Carrie was sure the movement was coming. Any second now.
“Effectively nothing. Inside the van, nothing of note. Mud, tiny patches of mud, in the footwell that they tried to match up later with mud from where the victims were found. But he was very careful if it was him. Cleaned everything up well. These days, with the victim’s flakes of skin and strands of hair and smatterings of blood on him, and him then going back to the van at some point, well, we’d have a better chance.”
“Inside the van, guv, you said. Inside the van. What was outside? Mud on the tyres?” Yes, thought Carrie, there it was, the shadow at the window moved back. But still there. Someone watching them sitting there talking.
Gayther breathed out – a long, drawn-out noise. He thought about what he was going to say. “Thing is, Carrie, these days, most members of the public assume the police is some sort of super-powerful organisation with mighty computers and instant access to every database everywhere and CCTV and DNA and so on – and that everything can be solved quickly and easily. Some of it is, but there are still so many variables.”
Carrie was distracted. By the shadow at the window. Thoughts and possibilities rolling helter-skelter through her mind. Then, aware of the lengthening silence and Gayther’s expectation of her next question, she spoke, “What do you mean, guv?”
“Policing, detective work, solving crimes – it’s not just about checking CCTV footage and getting DNA from dandruff on someone’s jacket collar. It’s not that bloody simple most of the time. It’s also about smart policing. Old Man Wilson noticing The Scribbler’s mark in a coroner’s report.
“It’s about lucky policing, too. The Yorkshire Ripper got caught because a traffic cop spotted what turned out to be fake plates on his car. A complete fluke, that was.
“And Dennis Nilsen, who killed and dismembered young gay men at his home in London, was only caught when a Dyno-Rod employee tried unblocking the drains there and found what he thought were flushed-away lumps of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Luck, Carrie, good or bad. That’s how so many cases unravel, not through clever-clever policing.”
And now the shado
w was gone. Out of sight. Hiding? Coming downstairs? Out the back and away? She spoke again, to alert Gayther, “Guv…?”
Gayther sighed loudly once more. “And sometimes, not solving crimes is about careless policing. Human error. Mistakes. Not seeing what’s in front of your eyes. Remember The Scribbler always used to go with the victims in their cars. Why? Maybe because there was something about his car that people might notice, that they might remember.”
He rifled quickly through the pages for a blurred photo photocopied onto a page. “Burgess had a teddy bear painted on the doors of the van representing his baby goods business. That’s been there right through – and I only just noticed it myself when I was going through all of the files at the weekend. A long-forgotten, overlooked photo that just slipped through over and again. Unbelievable, but it’s what happens sometimes. It let him get away.”
Or coming towards them? The shadow. Whoever it was. Out the front door and towards the car. “Guvnor…?” she said more emphatically.
And still Gayther went on talking, almost in a reverie, thought Carrie as she turned towards him, as if he’d prepared what he was going to say. “And this girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, wife, ex-wife, God knows what, she then retracted her statement anyway. Because she found herself pregnant … so it wasn’t all schoolboy sex … and then, who knows?”
He laughed again, ignored Carrie, and went on.
“Those days there was still a stigma … unmarried mothers. They move up there, he becomes a photographer, they have a baby, presumably, Thomas and Cotton have nothing on that, and they end up here. Living their days out in this fairy-tale setting … or not.” Finished at last, thought Carrie. About time.
Gayther turned his head towards the cottage.
And pulled back, startled. Carrie glanced over her shoulder and jumped too.
An old woman stood there, a shotgun pointing at them.
* * *
“Fall back, observe, call for support?” Carrie asked quickly in little more than a whisper.
“No time. Stay calm. Make eye contact …”
“Who are you and what do you want?”
The old woman, bloated and dishevelled, with a food-stained black T-shirt, loose grey jogging bottoms and men’s faded decking shoes, looked from Carrie to Gayther and back again. She angled the shotgun downwards and gestured for them to get out of the car.
“Do you have a firearms licence for that?” asked Carrie sharply as she stepped out.
The old woman looked at Carrie for a moment before answering. “I’ve a shotgun certificate if that’s what you mean. A .22. Rimfire. For vermin control and rabbiting. You see all sorts up there …” she gestured towards the fields, “with .308s, stalking deer. This is just for my bit of land.”
“You can’t go pointing it at people, though, can you?” Carrie half-asked, half-demanded, as Gayther walked round from the other side of the car towards them. “Not unless you want your licence revoked.”
The old woman shrugged. “I didn’t mean anything by it. A woman on her own needs something. You get all sorts here. Up by the woods. Creeps and weirdos. Couples meeting each other. Men usually. Doing things. It’s not decent. It’s not right.”
Gayther stepped forward. “Do you have a gun cabinet for it?”
She nodded, then shrugged again. “I thought you were the police. You have that look about you. Is that what you’ve come for, to check the certificate?”
Without waiting for a reply, she turned and walked slowly towards the cottage. Gayther and Carrie followed her along the path; once crazy-paved, now dull and overgrown with weeds.
“Stroke of luck,” Carrie whispered to Gayther, who nodded his agreement.
They stepped through the doorway. Into a worn and faded living room of dark browns, a soot-black fireplace and swirly carpets, unchanged for many years.
There was an overwhelming smell of damp and decay and something else – something Carrie could not quite place as she resisted the urge to put her fingers to her nose.
“Through here,” the old woman said, taking them into the narrow kitchen at the back. A wartime kitchen, thought Gayther, like his old grandmother had when he was a small boy. A rabbit lay dead on the windowsill. He noticed the kitchen opened on to a half-inside, half-outside, lean-to toilet. Door open. Seat up. Unflushed, he thought. He ignored the smell but noticed Carrie wrinkling her nose.
The woman pointed to a metal cabinet on the wall on the other side of the kitchen.
Gayther approached it, tugging to see if it was attached firmly to the wall. It was. He then pulled at the door to see if it opened. It did.
“Do you have a key for it?” he asked as the old woman leaned the shotgun against the sink. “Let me see you put it away before you show me the licence.”
The old woman opened the cupboard door beneath the sink and rummaged about inside. A moment or two later, she slowly withdrew her hand, holding a key, which she showed and then handed to Gayther.
“There’s not much point having a gun cabinet if a burglar could look under the sink and find the key for it. You might as well leave it on the windowsill,” he said.
The woman shrugged.
As if to say, ‘who cares’, thought Carrie. She looked like she might be drunk or had at least downed a drink or two to dull her misery.
This old, broken woman just stood there, waiting.
“It should be in a safe with a combination lock, at least,” Gayther said in a slightly raised voice. “Better still, a key safe with a fingerprint lock. This is a dangerous weapon. It kills. Where do you keep the ammunition?”
The woman turned to the sink again, as if in slow motion, bent down, rummaged about.
“Here,” she replied, as she stood back up. “Here’s the ammunition.”
Gayther took the box from her and Carrie could see he didn’t quite know what to say next.
“Let’s get this locked away properly now,” Carrie stepped in. “In the gun cabinet. Then find a good hiding place for the key while you sort out a proper place to keep it. And let’s see your certificate, please.”
The old woman looked at Carrie, then passed her the gun.
Gayther handed Carrie the key and the box of ammunition, which she put on the draining board next to the sink so she could sort out the cabinet.
The old woman turned and left the room to fetch the certificate.
“Guv?” Carrie asked after a moment, hearing the creak of the stairs as the woman walked up them. “Simon Burgess. There’s no sign of him living here.” She pointed to the single mug and bowl and spoon left on the draining board to be washed up.
“Ssshhh,” Gayther hushed Carrie. “I’m trying to listen.”
Creaking floorboards on the landing.
A moment’s silence. But no sound of voices, no unexpected movements, no sudden creaks from other parts of the cottage.
And then the faint screech as a drawer was opened. The old woman searching through papers.
Two or three minutes later, as Gayther and Carrie put the gun and the ammunition in the cabinet, the woman was back, a brown A5 envelope in her hand. She offered it to Gayther.
He took it carefully, fingertips at each corner, and looked down at the word ‘Shotgun’ written in the top left-hand corner. He then opened the envelope and slipped out the folded piece of paper, unfolded it slowly and looked at it.
“What is your name, please?”
“Angela Margaret Simmons.” She paused and added carefully, “Formerly Angela Burgess.”
He nodded. “This certificate is in the name of Simon Alan Burgess … and it’s out of date … look.”
She stood there, searching for words. She seemed surprised, thought Carrie. “I didn’t know,” she finally answered. “I thought a certificate covered a property.”
Gayther shook his head as he put the certificate back in the envelope and gently slipped it into his jacket pocket. “I’ll need to hang on to this for the time being, as evidence. Carrie, write Ms Simm
ons a receipt.”
Carrie looked blankly back at Gayther.
“Just write, in your notebook, shotgun certificate received from Angela Simmons by DI Gayther, then date it and sign it and tear it out to give to Ms Simmons.”
Gayther then turned back to the old woman.
“Angela.”
She looked at him with vague eyes.
“I need to speak to your … ex-husband, Simon Burgess.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because …” Gayther replied, thinking for a minute. He paused for so long that Carrie thought he had forgotten what he was going to say. She was about to prompt him when he spoke again.
“Because, Angela …”
Carrie stepped forward, took out her mobile phone, tapped two or three times and then scrolled down and showed her the photo of the hooded man leaving the Red Lion. “Is this your husband, Simon Burgess?”
She noted Gayther’s quick look of annoyance towards her, knowing full well it wasn’t Burgess.
The old woman stepped forward, peering myopically at the screen.
She looked up slowly at Carrie and then across at Gayther. “Get out,” she said suddenly. “Out. I’ve nothing to say to you.”
* * *
“Out!” the old woman said again, but louder this time, close to shouting, as Carrie and Gayther just stood there. “You’ve no right to be here, coming in under false pretences. This has nothing to do with my gun. You lied to me.”
Carrie looked over at Gayther, as she closed her mobile phone and put it back in her pocket.
Gayther held his hands up, palms outwards in a conciliatory gesture. But he didn’t move.
“We just want to speak to Simon to—” he said calmly.
“If you don’t get out of this house now,” the woman interrupted, “I’ll pick up the phone and call 999.”
Carrie looked at Gayther, who inclined his head towards the living room, indicating she should leave.
The Scribbler Page 14