The Career Killer

by Ali Gunn

  ‘Mabey!’ he guffawed over a mouthful of roast potatoes. ‘Finally come to see what all the fuss is about, eh?’

  The fuss he referred to was the legendary all-you-can-eat roast dinner. It was a miracle that the pub hadn’t gone bust giving Fairbanks his fill of lamb, pork, and chicken plus all the gubbins for a mere twelve pounds.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Elsie said. She took the seat opposite him and leant back. When she spoke, her words were deliberate, measured. ‘Evidence has come to light linking my investigation into Layla Morgan’s death with your investigation into the death of Leonella Boileau.’

  ‘Hmm, Boileau, Boileau.... Remind me again which one that was?’

  His tone was that of a man trying to remember a point of trivia. As soon as he’d finished speaking, he stuffed another forkful of fatty pork into his mouth. Before he’d even chewed once, he delved back in to reload his fork for the next bite. It was like watching a starving man eat a proper meal for the first time in years.

  How he couldn’t remember a victim as memorable as Leonella Boileau was mind-boggling. While it was true that each Murder Investigation Team had around a dozen open cases at any given time, Elsie couldn’t believe he’d forgotten one of the most unusual murders ever committed in London.

  ‘The girl in the black dress over in Chelsea Physic Garden.’

  He chewed his pork for an eternity and then spat the last of the gristle into a napkin which he put on the edge of his plate. ‘Oh, the darkie. What about her?’

  Elsie gritted her teeth. The ease with which Fairbanks could throw out a casual racist slur summed up his character.

  ‘The pathologist believes the same person killed again on Friday night,’ Elsie said, forcing herself to keep her voice steady. She stared straight down her nose at Fairbanks not to intimidate him, but to avoid looking at the plate in front of him. ‘I’m here to notify you that I’m surrendering the case to you.’

  ‘What utter hogwash. Rags like The Impartial might think we’ve got a serial killer running around London sticking women in fancy frocks and posing them in gardens, but nobody in their right mind could countenance such nonsense. You’ve been had, lass. It’s a mistake your father would never have made.’

  Anger boiled up inside her. Would she ever escape the shadow of the great DCI Peter Mabey? Every time she made progress in her career, someone, somewhere had to compare her to dear old Dad. They had to insinuate she’d traded on his name for her command whether deliberately or not. If she ever did solve this case, no doubt they’d still find some way to turn her success into a negative. The first homicide she had solved – a relatively straightforward death by dangerous driving case – was met with comparisons to her dad’s first case. Of course, Dad had landed a murder on his first try, and so whatever she managed to achieve would always be worthless by comparison. He cast a long and seemingly inescapable shadow.

  Still, she forced herself to remain calm. If she showed her anger, Fairbanks would know how much he could get to her, and so easily too.

  She folded her arms across her chest. ‘The details of the first murder were highly publicised. The similarities so far could indicate a copycat. That said, I think it best that the same team runs both cases regardless.’

  ‘Sounds like a waste of my time,’ Fairbanks said. ‘You do it.’

  Her fingers gripped her arms so tight that her knuckles began to turn white. She wanted the case, but not like this. Not if it meant he won. ‘That’s not proper procedure, sir.’

  ‘So?’ he mocked. ‘You’ve got no chance of catching this guy, and I’ve wasted as much time as I’m going to on a mulatto. There are more important cases that demand my time. You want to waste the next six months of your life then go for it, but mark my words, all you’ll ever prove is that you aren’t half the detective your father was. All you’re good for is demonstrating that we tried. You tick that box, and the rest of us can investigate the crimes that really matter.’

  The temptation to punch him grew ever stronger. For a fleeting moment, she imagined her fist striking right between his piggy little eyes, and the fat man’s chair toppling backwards and him tumbling to the floor. At the end of the table, the glint of a heavy glass water jug caught her eye. Before she could even think about the consequences, she found herself reaching for it. It was nearly full and heavy with it. Her arm moved without thinking, and she watched it in slow motion as if watching someone else take over for her.

  Time sped back up, and she upended the jug over Fairbanks, drenching him so thoroughly that his shirt clung to his rolls of fat.

  ‘You bitch!’ he spat. ‘I’ll have your warrant card for this!’

  In a heartbeat, her doubts evaporated. The risks be damned, she could do this. It didn’t matter that serial murders were exceptionally hard to investigate. It didn’t matter that her team was greener than an unripe banana. It didn’t even matter that Fairbanks’ own botched initial investigation would significantly impede her ability to get justice for Boileau. It was her challenge and she knew how to live up to it.

  Elsie leant forward, her face towering inches above his. ‘Try it. Try it, and I’ll tell everyone exactly why I did it. I’ll tell them what a useless, fat, racist, waste of space you really are, and you know they’ll agree with me. You’re not half the man my father is, and, in case you haven’t noticed, Chief Inspector, I’m not a man. No matter my shortcomings, I’m twice the detective you’ll ever be, and I will get justice for these women, you mark my words.’

  He was welcome to snivel to the Directorate of Professional Standards for all she cared. He could even go and try to complain to dear old Dad, not that it would do him much good.

  She was her own woman, with her own team, and she knew she would solve these murders or die trying.

  Chapter 14: Two Dead Ends

  Now they had two cases to investigate, the incident room seemed to shrink as the detritus of the combined operation grew beyond control. Reports, photographs, and diagrams littered every available surface waiting to be pinned up on the boards. The room hummed as support staff buzzed around like flies, adding little but making the room so unbearably hot that the stench of unwashed armpits hung in the air. What Elsie needed was space to think, to sleep, and to cogitate. She couldn’t show weakness lest she undermine her leadership, and the fatigue was growing worse with every passing hour. Physical sleep deprivation had compounded her fog until her caffeine-drenched brain could no longer focus.

  ‘Boss?’ Stryker called out. ‘The printer’s whirring again.’

  It had barely stopped all morning. Everything had to be printed, read, sorted and logged. They were swamped with documents from forensics, from the pathologist’s lab, and a transcript for every hoax tip that had come in via the switchboard. Every sensational murder brought out the nutters; those who tried to confess to every crime, the psychics predicting things that any old idiot could guess, and the conspiracy theorists who thought the government was behind every crime. The team, except for Knox who was still AWOL, had assembled to sift through everything, and all were waiting with bated breath for the DNA results.

  A deluge of support personnel was required to deal with it all. The finance manager, two evidence clerks and half a dozen other support staff doing God knows what all beavered away in the background as Elsie worked.

  She picked up the latest printout, saw the heading “Sample SDEDec07A081”, which was the reference code for unknown contact fibres founds on Layla Morgan’s dress, and called for hush.

  As she did, the door opened. Knox slunk in. She loitered in the doorway, her head in her phone. She was oblivious to Elsie’s glare.

  Stryker cleared his throat. ‘The results, boss?’

  She gave the printout a quick scan. ‘It appears we have fibres on Layla Morgan’s wedding dress that are consistent with those found on Leonella Boileau’s lace gown.’

  If she had hoped for a reaction, she didn’t get it.

  ‘So?’ Stryker asked.

 
; ‘So,’ Elsie said. ‘It is indicative of a serial killer.’

  ‘I’m not following. They’re just random fibres. Couldn’t they have come from anywhere? I’m not sold on either of your theories. This could be a one-off murder by a woman. There are women my height about. It could be a copycat for all we know. Annie used gender-neutral terms all the way through her report so why are we assuming it’s a man?’

  He looked so dubious that she’d have to show him.

  ‘You’re right to be sceptical. But you’re wrong on this one,’ Elsie said. ‘The killer is almost certainly a man. Women your size might exist – I’m one of them after all – but women just don’t have the physicality. But don’t take my word for it. Inspector Stryker and Sergeant Matthews, would you kindly join me at the front of the room?’

  They traipsed up, glancing at each other with bemusement. While they obligingly waited, Elsie snatched her iPad off the conference table and opened up the photos of the dress. With a swipe, she cast the photos to the room’s projector which hummed to life and projected a flickering image on the wall behind her.

  ‘This is the dress that Layla was found in. As well as the obvious fact that it’s at least two sizes too big for her, it’s also quite...’ her brain seized up, the word eluding her ‘... billowy. It puffs up so that anyone who wears it could easily knock things off tables around them without realising. Matthews, I want you to pretend you’re wearing this dress.’

  ‘Right...’ She looked unconvinced and mockingly ran her hands over the contours of an imaginary dress.

  ‘And you’re dead.’

  Matthews obligingly fell to the floor with a thud. She looked up at Elsie with a grin before squeezing her eyes shut and letting her neck go limp.

  ‘Sergeant Matthews, I want you to let all your limbs go as floppy as possible. Dead people can’t hold their own weight. Now, Inspector Stryker, I want you to pick her up and put her over your shoulder.’

  He looked at her as if to question her sanity. ‘Get on with it then,’ Elsie said with a smirk. He shrugged, stooped low and paused as if trying to decide how best to lift her, and then grabbed her around the waist. He hauled her up onto his shoulder with relative ease.

  Matthews was about the same size as Leonella Boileau’s five foot seven frame so she was the perfect proxy victim. Her body draped over his shoulder with her legs on one side of him and her torso on the other. It seemed like an obvious way for a body to be carried, and yet Matthews was distributing her body weight evenly which made it much easier for Stryker.

  ‘Limp, Matthews, remember that you’re dead.’

  She flopped, her limbs dangling, and Stryker staggered under the undistributed weight. Without Matthews helping, his job became much harder. Elsie knew it was the difference between carrying a child who was awake versus the cumbersome nature of lugging around a sleeping child, just on a much bigger scale.

  ‘Now, imagine you’re carrying Matthews for the hundred and fifty feet from the nearest road to the bench where we found the body at St Dunstan in the East, maybe even a little more. Sounds pretty painful doesn’t it?’ She looked at the grimace on Stryker’s face and decided to really ram her point home. ‘In fact, don’t imagine it. Pace the room for me. Back and forth for a hundred and fifty feet or so.’

  Elsie was beginning to enjoy herself. Stryker huffed as he carried Matthews back and forth. After a few short minutes, he was sweating profusely.

  ‘Alright, that’s enough. Anyone still doubt that it was a man who carried Layla Morgan?’

  Despite being a behemoth of a man, Stryker had visibly struggled to carry Matthews’ weight. It was inconceivable that a woman could pull off such a physical feat. Elsie was stronger than nearly every woman she knew and she’d never have managed to carry Matthews for more than a few feet.

  Nobody raised a hand. One issue down. Now for the snagged thread from the wedding dress that Annie had found a hundred and eighty-two centimetres off the ground.

  ‘Now, imagine that big billowy dress with the wind whipping through. Every gust would have caused the dress to move and flow in the air. I don’t think the thread height gives us much information – our little demo here shows that. The wind could have whipped the dress up, increasing the height of the fibre, or gravity could have dragged it down during a quiet moment.’

  ‘How,’ Stryker panted, ‘does this relate to the common fibres you’re on about?’

  ‘Simple,’ Elsie said. ‘Contact transfer. The pressure from the body would make textiles more likely to rub off you and onto Matthews. By the same principle, the fibres we’ve got are likely to have rubbed off the killer’s shirt at the shoulder and been transferred to the victim’s dress while she was carried. The fact that we’ve got two victims, both with similar fabrics, suggests our killer carried them while wearing the same coat.’

  She’d checked with Annie that it was plausible when she’d signed off on the expense of analysing the fibres. The crime scene manager had replied with nothing more than a journal article entitled “The Transfer of Textile Fibres During Simulated Contacts” published in the Journal of the Forensic Science Society back in eighty-two. Luckily, the conclusion was in the abstract so Elsie didn’t have to wade through the whole thing.

  He picked up the printout from where Elsie had left it on the desk. ‘Hardly DNA, though, is it?’ Stryker said. ‘Surely, they made more than one coat, shirt, whatever from... polyester?’

  ‘As Annie will no doubt remind us, it’s merely consistent.’

  ‘There’s also sweat at the same point,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Which doesn’t connect the two murders, does it? All that proves is that carrying a body is hot, heavy work.’

  She nodded. ‘There are DNA samples we haven’t analysed. Something is likely to be in there – our killer had extensive contact with the dresses. Getting definitive proof – either way – is our number one priority.’

  ‘I agree,’ Stryker said.

  ‘Good because I need you to chase, chase, and chase the lab for confirmation of a DNA match. I need it yesterday. I don’t care what you have to do to get it moving. Beg, borrow, steal whatever resources we need – and then send the bill to DCI Fairbanks. He’ll be only too pleased to see Leonella Boileau get justice. Got it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Then get going. Call them now. If nobody answers, call back. Just keep calling.’ In theory the turnaround time was nine hours on any day except Sunday when the team behind the police DNA database took time off. It struck Elsie as daft that it wasn’t yet a round-the-clock service. Criminals didn’t take Sundays off, Elsie had worked Sunday. The boys in forensics might argue that they were only two hours into the working day on a Monday morning – and no doubt had a backlog to get through after taking it easy on Sunday – but it didn’t cut the mustard in Elsie’s book.

  Once he was gone, she turned her attention to her sergeants. The room still felt claustrophobic and both women knew that Knox was about to get a rollicking.

  ‘Sergeant Knox, I think you owe me an explanation.’

  Knox looked around the room. While Stryker was gone, the room was still abuzz with support staff.

  ‘I was ill, wasn’t I? ’Nuff said.’

  It most certainly was not enough said. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that, Sergeant Knox. You’ve been absent since Friday and we all know you were drunk.’

  ‘Tha’s my prerogative, innit?’ Knox said.

  ‘Not when you answer a page acknowledging it and then fail to show up.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t what?’

  ‘Fail to show up. I was there, wasn’t I, Georgie? Seb said we could go home.’

  He did what? Elsie turned her ire on Matthews.

  ‘You told me you didn’t make it.’

  ‘Err...’

  ‘The truth, Matthews, now, or I’ll fire both of you.’

  ‘Wouldn’t do that if I were you, love,’ Knox said. ‘I was off sick. Can’t dis
criminate against me for being ill now.’

  ‘Got a doctor’s note?’ Elsie demanded.

  Knox shook her head. ‘Don’t need one. I can self-certify for five days. That’s the law.’

  Elsie floundered. Knox might well be right. ‘Regardless, what do you mean you were at the crime scene? Matthews?’

  Matthews took a step back as if afraid of being caught between Knox and Matthews. ‘We’d had a couple so when we got there... well, Seb – Stryker – said we couldn’t be there.’

  Words would be had with Inspector Stryker. ‘Why on earth did you acknowledge the page? You both ought to know the rules. If you’re not in a fit state, don’t reply and it’ll be escalated to the backup rota. You left me short of manpower at a critical time. Consider yourselves on probation. Last chance – yes, both of you. Now, sit down and help me.’

  Knox glared back at her but still took a seat as far away as it was possible to be within the confines of the incident room. Matthews followed her like a puppy.

  ‘Time for you to prove you’re worth keeping on this team,’ Elsie said. ‘What ideas are you two bringing to the table?’

  They looked at her in silence for a moment. She stared back, confident that one of them would feel so awkward that they would be compelled to volunteer something.

  ‘Boss, if it is a serial, what about geographic profiling?’ Matthews said tentatively.

  It wouldn’t work. Geographic profiling was the idea that a serial killer started their spree close to home, and then spiralled outwards as he or she became more comfortable. The problem, and in the circumstances, it was a good problem, was that they only had two data points to use. Fewer victims was never a bad thing.