The Career Killer

by Ali Gunn

  Stryker grabbed the stack of boards. He stumbled under their weight.

  ‘You alright there, Seb?’

  He flashed a forced smile. Typical man. ‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ he said.

  Once the mildly delayed cabbie had been paid, he reversed full throttle to escape the artificial dead-end created by the parked police cars and then sped off with his tyres screeching as if he couldn’t wait for his next fare.

  Annie turned to her rescuer. ‘Thanks, Seb. Send me your bank details, and I’ll square us up tomorrow morning, I promise.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Stryker said. ‘I’ll stick it on expenses.’ He flashed her a smile, and then added, ‘Elsie won’t care. I assume from the kitbag that you’re with forensics.’

  She nodded. The enormous bag she dragged along must have weighed a ton as it was laden down with everything that she needed from luminol to camera. Within minutes of arriving, while Stryker lumbered along behind her and asked questions machine-gun style, one after the other, she changed into her forensics suit, put on gloves – two pairs as required by law – and then began laying boards down at the edge of the crime scene.

  ‘Bit late for that,’ Stryker said. ‘The boss wanted to get a move on.’

  Her jaw dropped. She knew he’d been on-site – his footprints were visible in the mud – but to admit having broken procedure was astounding.

  ‘Look, Seb, this might be your first rodeo,’ Annie said sternly. ‘But it isn’t mine. You want to catch your killer and get a clean, safe conviction then you have to follow my rules. No access without proper suits, no touching the body, and I get first crack at the crime scene. Do we understand each other?’

  The cheeky smile vanished. A brief nod signalled his acquiescence.

  ‘Right, then you go do your job. I’ll do mine.’

  STRYKER FUMED, NOT at Annie Burke, but at himself. He ought to have known that the crime scene was sacrosanct. He was stuck in the middle. He agreed with the rules and didn’t yet know how much they could be bent before they broke. Elsie’s argument that the killer could be nearby was powerful in the moment but was now less urgent as Annie imposed order and logic upon the crime scene. He watched her and wondered just how much evidence would be left once the rain had finally stopped. Judging by the slick grey stone underfoot, any trace evidence was probably in the gutter by now.

  ‘What’re you looking for?’ he asked Annie as she continued to beaver away.

  ‘Inceptive evidence.’

  He looked at her blankly. They kept using that phrase, one he’d never heard in his life. Google hadn’t been much help either. She took the hint.

  ‘I’m looking for stuff you can use right now like a gun or a knife, or blood drops trailing across the ground. Anything we find now can be expedited – assuming your boss doesn’t mind the expense.’

  ‘When will you know if we’ve got anything?’

  ‘Thankfully it’s not a Sunday so if we find trace DNA, you’re looking at about a nine-hour turnaround with the national DNA database.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Sundays?’

  ‘They’re closed,’ Annie said. ‘No idea why. Now can you step back – a little further please – that’s it, just the other side of that wall.’

  Stryker kept stepping back through the archway and up the steps until Annie was completely out of view.

  ‘Are you messing with me?’ he called out from the upper level of the garden. ‘Is this like sending the newbie out to buy tartan paint?’

  ‘Nope,’ Annie said. He heard ruffling. Presumably, Annie was searching through her bag. If she were following proper procedure – and he had no doubt at all in his mind that she would be – then she’d have to start by photographing the crime scene. He stepped forward to sneak a peek and saw the glint of a camera lens.

  ‘Annie, don’t you normally stand in the corner?’

  She turned in the direction of his voice and saw him peering around the archway to watch her work. ‘It used to be done that way. That’s the old method of photographing a crime scene. Now we do it this way.’

  He watched as she put a wide-angle lens – marked “28mm” – onto a tripod at the centre of the crime scene. She walked around the wall to stand next to Stryker so she wasn’t in the shot.

  ‘Now I just press this button,’ she said. The moment that she did, the camera began to rotate through three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees. ‘It’s like your phone’s panorama feature but better.’

  Stryker smiled appreciatively as she returned to the lower level of the garden. ‘Can I come back?’ he called after her.

  ‘Nope,’ Annie said loudly. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  So that was how it was. He didn’t blame her. He already felt like he was getting under her feet. With a huge crime scene to process – and no sign of reinforcements on the way – she needed to crack on alone, and he had to do likewise.

  Chapter 5: One Too Many

  His encounters with Annie and Doctor Spilsbury had left Stryker feeling like the proverbial village idiot. His first day working for DCI Mabey had been a big adjustment from life in Yorkshire, and it only got worse when he heard the unmistakeable click-clacking of high heels along the rainswept alleyway, more than one pair by the sounds of it. Then he heard two women giggling far too loudly. When he proceeded to look just past the security cordon, he found Patty Knox and Georgia Matthews stumbling along, obviously tipsy. The former swayed on her feet, drool running down the corner of her mouth while Matthews held her up.

  Knox looked at him curiously as if trying to work out if she knew him. Without any warning, Knox flung herself towards him, her handbag flying wildly and upending its contents all over the pavement. He realised she was going to fall just in time to leap forwards. He caught her awkwardly, his arm taking the brunt of her weight. She looked up at him as if it were his fault that she had tripped.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Stryker muttered. Matthews stooped to gather Knox’s belongings just as a lipstick rolled into the gutter, through the grate and into the drain below.

  ‘Bugger,’ Matthews muttered as she stuffed everything back in haphazardly. Her movements were slow and uncoordinated. Stryker suspected that she’d had a couple of drinks. Tipsy, not drunk, unlike Knox who was so far gone that she was now leaning heavily into him, clinging onto his arm for dear life.

  She poked him in the chest with a yellow calloused finger. ‘You,’ she slurred. ‘I know you!’ She twisted to look at Matthews and waved off the handbag that Matthews was trying to return. ‘Don’t I know him, Georgie?’

  ‘You do, Knoxy, you do,’ Matthews said. She was merry, but not slurring-her-words. His hunch that she’d had two or three was on the money.

  Stryker watched them talking to each other, his own presence superfluous, and exhaled deeply, trying his best to stay calm. First, the boss ignored his calls, then he messed up with the crime scene manager, and now he had to deal with drunk colleagues. Could today get any worse?

  ‘I see we’ve been to the pub,’ he said. ‘How many have you had?’

  ‘Bottles?’ asked Knox. She squinted at her hand and began to fold down fingers. ‘One... two...’

  Before she could get to three, Stryker held up a hand. ‘Girls, you can’t be here while you’re under the influence. Go home, drink loads of water, and get a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘Go home? Why would I do that?’ Knox swayed on her feet. ‘’tis early yet, pretty boy. Why don’t you come back to the pub with us?’

  ‘Sure,’ he lied. ‘Let’s grab a cab, shall we? Where is it that you live, Knox?’

  ‘Putney way, handsome,’ she said. ‘But don’t you get ahead of yourself, alright?’

  It took Stryker real restraint not to puke. He led them back towards the main road and flagged down a cab.

  ‘After you,’ he said as he held the door open. Then he whispered to Matthews, ‘Get her home. Look after her, won’t you?’

  Matthews, who was still clutching Knox’s handbag, nodded he
r thanks as she clambered in.

  ‘A proper gentleman!’ Knox said. ‘Ain’t had one of them in a while, have we Georgie? I call dibs.’

  The two women were clearly as thick as thieves.

  ‘Did you two already know each other?’ he asked with one hand on the still-open door.

  ‘We did,’ Matthews said. ‘Did my placement with Knox and Fairbanks. It’s so nice to see her again.’

  That explained the unspoken camaraderie that Stryker was missing out on. He closed the door behind the girls and leant down to the front passenger side window.

  ‘Driver, Putney please,’ Stryker said

  ‘You ain’t getting in?’ The driver said in a thick Scottish brogue. ‘Your friends look like they’re going ta puke in ma cab.’

  ‘They won’t,’ he said with little conviction. He flashed his warrant card. ‘Police business.’

  It sounded even lamer than he’d expected.

  The cabbie laughed at him. ‘Right, and are you going ta pay for cleaning ma cab, Mr Officer Sir?’

  Stryker felt for his wallet. Sixty quid to help Annie out, and now this. It was just as well he’d visited an ATM this morning in anticipation of a big Friday night on the town. ‘How much?’ he demanded. He had yet to get used to London prices. Cabs seemed to operate a racket whereby prices leapt at evening and weekends, not that the alternative was much better what with Uber’s bewildering surge pricing.

  The cabbie stared at Stryker’s wallet as if trying to work out how much he could afford to pay.

  ‘Hundred quid, and if the plastered one manages not ta puke, I’ll give ’em back half.’

  Fat chance he’d see that fifty quid ever again. Once the last remnants of his wallet were gone, the cabbie sped off with DS Knox near catatonic in the back. Hopefully, Matthews was sober enough to get Knox home without causing any more trouble. He just needed them as far away from his crime scene as humanly possible. This was the sort of unprofessional crap he’d left Yorkshire to try and avoid.

  Time to do the best with what he had.

  Chapter 6: Travelling Unseen

  He turned on the spot, St Dunstan’s Hill suddenly quiet. He shivered as the rain pelted down. The lights around the crime scene seemed almost ephemeral in the darkness. No doubt Annie’s team would soon be swarming all over the site looking for the tiniest trace of the killer. He didn’t envy them that task. Back when he’d been investigating drug smuggling, the forensics were much easier – take a sniffer dog out, see if it barked. Some sniffer dogs could be trained to bark on command, and that always worried him as it undermined the whole point of using them. Annie’s task was to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. If anyone could find it, he knew it would be her.

  Stryker ran through a checklist in his mind. How did the killer get in, how did they get away, and how was it that nobody saw them dragging a body through central London?

  The answer to the first would likely answer the second. It was the third that posed the biggest challenge. There were roads running around the perimeter of St Dunstan. The nearest road to the dump site ran down the eastern edge near where he’d parked earlier.

  The killer had to have driven to the dump site. There was no way in hell that someone had lugged a body off a train at Fenchurch Street or ambled through the universally detested underground station at Bank with a body in tow. Even in London, nobody was that wilfully blind.

  The corner of an office building at the southern end of the road offered some respite from the downpour. Stryker took refuge in front of its revolving door and then pulled up the Met’s London traffic map on his phone. The light of his phone cast a dim glow over the nearby red, black and white City of London bollards. When the map had loaded, he centred the map on St Dunstan in the East. He didn’t know London too well yet but even he could see that the best way of getting into St Dunstan unseen would mean approaching the City from the east. From the traffic alerts within the mapping app, he could see that the roads were gridlocked to the west. It would take serious balls to sit in a bumper-to-bumper queue with a body in the boot.

  To the south, there were numerous ANPR cameras on Tower Bridge which ruled out that approach. The east was the only way in. If the map was right then so long as the killer avoided coming in on the A1203 from East Smithfield or the A13 through Whitechapel, it was possible to drive all the way to St Dunstan without driving past a number plate recognition camera.

  It would have required extensive research on the killer’s part to find all of the cameras, map them and then plot routes in and out of St Dunstan in the East that didn’t go past a single camera. While Stryker had access to the Metropolitan Police’s internal ANPR map, the general public didn’t. Could the killer have known which roads to avoid?

  Once again Stryker turned to the internet for answers. One quick search for “ANPR camera map London”, and, to his disgust, he found a Google Map belonging to a pro-privacy campaign group. It listed the locations of hundreds of ANPR cameras in London. A careful criminal could easily use this to stay off the grid while driving. Worse yet, if he marked each of the cameras as a traffic hot spot, his phone’s mapping app would find the camera-free route in seconds. He opened up the Met’s own map to compare and found it eerily accurate as if someone on the inside had let slip where the fixed cameras were installed.

  As Stryker had suspected, simply avoiding the ‘A’ roads was almost enough to miss every camera in the area. A simple route down Fenchurch Street onto Leman Street and then out east via Shadwell would do the trick. As long as the killer circumnavigated the Limehouse tunnel, they could be well beyond the cameras and blend into the traffic within ten minutes.

  Private CCTV was another matter. There was no centralised map which meant Stryker would have to traverse the streets on foot. It wasn’t his favourite task. He knew that many security cameras would be fakes, many more would be poor quality, and even where footage did exist it might not be willingly surrendered. The team would have to run down every lead, talk to every shop owner, call every third-party security firm and make sure that they left no stone unturned. The quiet hum of the main road to the south was punctuated by the occasional thwack as Annie continued to lay down the boards to protect the floor of the crime scene. The noise echoed off the buildings.

  This was familiar territory, the simple dogged procedure of an investigation. Just last year he’d had a case where a shop owner had volunteered footage from the camera outside his shop. The camera had been angled to cover the front of the shop. On the edge of the frame, it was possible to see a narrow slice of the road. That gave Stryker a hobbled view with which he’d managed to pull a partial number plate for each and every car that drove by. It was the kind of slow laborious task that seldom yielded results, but on that occasion, it had proved that the man in the dock had driven his Saab right past the shop. While it wasn’t enough to find the criminal, it was enough to nail him in court by making a mockery of his alibi.

  Tonight, Stryker wanted to approach the investigation in the same way. He’d walk a slow spiral radiating out from the crime scene, and for every camera he’d take a photo of its location, write down the name of the business which it appeared to be guarding, and drop a Google pin on his phone to record the GPS location. That would give him a hit list to return to when they opened in the morning.

  It should have been straightforward. The nearest proved anything but. It was on the same building which he’d taken shelter under, less than fifty feet from the revolving door. It pointed due north along St Dunstan’s Hill towards Great Tower Street. From the lack of a red light, Stryker didn’t think it was on. The office had loosely boarded-up windows, and an ‘office space available, from 500 to 20,000 square feet’ sign prominently displayed at the top of the building.

  Perhaps that was how the killer had managed to dump the body without being seen. There were no occupants looking out over St Dunstan. These offices were usually bustling as it was prime land in the heart of zone one, but the recent recession
, combined with soaring business rates, had hollowed out many of central London’s skyscraper office blocks. Was that merely fortuitous or did the killer have local knowledge?

  Technology was making Stryker’s job much harder than it would have been in bygone years. Before the internet, he could have happily assumed that such knowledge meant a local perpetrator. With the rise of websites offering property to rent, it was no longer the case. A careful criminal could pre-empt many lines of enquiry with a bit of diligent planning.

  ‘Oi!’ a voice called from the darkness. ‘Clear off!’

  Stryker turned. The voice appeared to be coming from the front door to the empty office block. A homeless person?

  He squinted into the darkness. Beyond the pallid light cast by the lamppost above him, Stryker could make out a figure in the darkness. He stepped towards it, his heart rate rising in anticipation of a confrontation.

  The speaker was a gruff, bearded man dressed in just jeans and a T-shirt despite the rain and cold. He was still dry so he couldn’t have been outside for more than a minute. Big eyes, one of which stared off to the side in the most unnerving fashion, locked onto Stryker.

  ‘Who’re you?’ Stryker demanded.

  The man puffed himself up and bellowed back in an accent that Stryker couldn’t quite place. It was neither northern nor Irish nor Scots, but some weird amalgamation of the three. ‘Who am I? Who the feck are you? I saw you looking through me window.’

  His window? Stryker glanced at the gap between the boards, then back at the big man. If that was what counted as a window in London, he might have to return to Yorkshire after all.

  ‘You squatting here?’ Stryker said. He stepped closer still. As his eyes adjusted to the light, the man’s dirty blond beard glinted in the moonlight. He didn’t look much like any of the squatters that Stryker had met.

  ‘Naw,’ the man spat. ‘I live ‘ere. Now clear off before I call the fuzz.’