The Career Killer

by Ali Gunn

  ‘Are you the owner?’

  ‘The proprietress is currently with a client, Mr...?’

  ‘Stryker, and it’s detective inspector. Could you tell her the police need a word please, love?’

  For a split second her eyes went wide and then her shock was gone as quickly as it came. She had an impressive poker face. ‘What shall I tell her this is regarding?’

  ‘Murder.’

  Her poker face failed her. She scurried off through the door at the back, presumably to find Mrs Quadrozzi. When she hadn’t emerged after two minutes, Stryker went after her. As soon as he pushed through the door marked “Private”, he found himself in a huge open room with what appeared to be a tufted futon in the middle of it. In an alcove at the back, there was a long gold rail hung with haphazardly placed dresses in a variety of sizes. Stryker assumed that they had been tried on and were waiting to be returned to the immaculate mannequins in the window out front.

  ‘You can’t be here!’ a voice called out from behind him. Stryker turned, expecting to see the young woman he’d spoken to before. The voice sounded almost identical. He did a double take. The woman in front of him looked just like the receptionist with an identical heart-shaped face, the same lithe figure and even similar attire. But for the grey hair and the telltale sagging skin around the throat, Stryker could have mistaken this new woman for the first. He’d bet anything that they were related.

  ‘Mrs Quadrozzi?’

  ‘Yes, that is me,’ she said. ‘You are the rude man who scared my daughter with his talk of murder.’

  She sounded scandalised as if the mere mention of a crime would ruin the rarefied air of her boutique. Stryker fished in his inside jacket pocket for his warrant card. ‘Detective Inspector Stryker, Homicide Command. I’m investigating the death of Leonella Boileau.’

  ‘Terrible, terrible. I saw her in the news...’ She bowed her head in reverence before she realised why Stryker was there. ‘Detective, are you saying that the dress was one of mine?’

  ‘I am afraid so.’

  ‘No!’ Quadrozzi cried. ‘The publicity, the bad press... this is terrible! I must call Walter.’

  He couldn’t help asking. ‘Who is Walter?’

  ‘My publicist, he will know what to do.’

  The reality of the situation had escaped Quadrozzi entirely. She paced up and down, barely aware that Stryker was watching her like a hawk.

  ‘Mrs Quadrozzi, you have more immediate problems.’

  She stopped in her tracks and turned to face him. ‘What might those be, Mr Stryker?’

  ‘I need to know who bought the dress.’

  ‘I cannot!’ Quadrozzi said. ‘Our clients demand the utmost of privacy.’

  ‘Then,’ Stryker said slowly, deliberately pausing for effect, ‘surely they’d hate for the media to camp out the front? Might put a cramp in your style.’

  ‘Yes... yes... can you keep this quiet, Inspector?’ Quadrozzi said. ‘I can pay.’

  Stryker ignored her offer of a bribe. ‘I can try to keep it quiet, just tell me how your dress ended up on my victim.’

  ‘I cannot!’ Quadrozzi protested. ‘I sold it, and after that, it is out of my hands.’

  ‘Who did you sell it to?’

  ‘I will have to check my ledger...’

  ‘You do that,’ Stryker said. ‘I’ll wait.’

  Chapter 36: Idle Gossip

  The investigation was losing steam moment by moment and hour by hour. The clock was ticking as Elsie stared listlessly at the boards in the incident room. If the killer conformed to Uncle Bertie’s expectations, he or she would strike again before the week was out. Serial killers almost always accelerated as they lost control.

  It had to be a man. Nelly had a whole life that Beya knew nothing about. Perhaps the same was true of Layla Morgan. Nobody existed in a vacuum. The problem was the complete lack of leads.

  It was proving no end of trouble to keep the team on track. Knox was continually disappearing to do her own thing and no threat nor inducement could persuade her otherwise. God knows where she was right now. Stryker kept trying but he was too quick off the mark, never thinking through his actions. As for Matthews, she was greener than an unripe banana. The novice was sitting at the end of the table tapping away at Nelly’s mobile phone, working her way down a list of four-digit numbers that appeared to be a hodgepodge lacking order or logic.

  She’d dreamed of having her own team her entire career and now here she had it and they weren’t acting like a team at all. What Elsie needed was to impose order on the investigation. That meant knowing what everyone was doing, why they were doing it and then deciding if it was the best use of their limited resources. The superintendent was already breathing down her neck to make progress on the Layla Morgan case – though, Elsie noted sadly, he didn’t seem interested in spending more than a minute discussing Beya’s concerns about how Fairbanks had handled the initial investigation into Nelly’s death.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘Amazing,’ Matthews said. ‘I can’t wait for my date tonight-’

  ‘Not personally,’ Elsie said, rolling her eyes. ‘With cracking that mobile.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She looked crestfallen. Elsie could see she had the smirk of a woman in the first flushes of a new relationship. Her father called it “girlfriend head”, that ditzy state where a woman obsesses over her new beau to the point that it gets on everyone else’s nerves.

  ‘Your list seems a bit... random?’ Elsie said. Now that she looked more closely, the numbers were all over the show. Some were numbers that Elsie recognised as the most common PIN numbers. Those had all been crossed off. The next section was something else entirely.

  ‘I’m trying the numbers that Nelly is most likely to have used first,’ Matthews explained. ‘It’s not one of the common PINs. Nor is it family related. PIN numbers that refer to dates are common so I’m working my way through those right now. It’s taking a while.’

  ‘Okay,’ Elsie said. ’How much progress have you made?’

  ‘I’ve got four lists to work my way through. I’m almost done with this one.’ Matthews pointed at the list right in front of her. It had most of the numbers already crossed off. ‘This one is in the format day day month month.’

  ‘That would make Christmas twenty-five twelve?’

  ‘Kinda,’ Matthews said with a knowing smile. ‘While we celebrate Christmas on the twenty-fifth of December, that isn’t true everywhere. For example, Orthodox churches in Russia celebrate on January seventh.’

  ‘Which would be oh seven oh one under your system,’ Elsie said. ‘Our victim is French-Algerian. When do they celebrate Christmas?’

  Matthews’ smile evaporated. ‘December twenty-fifth. But that’s not my point. We can’t make any assumptions. Odds are that Nelly would have picked something memorable but not something obvious.’

  ‘Presumably, your second list is year year year year?’

  ‘Totally, and then I’ve got another list for month month year year. If none of that works, I’ll have to go through one at a time like Stryker wanted.’

  ‘Hold up a second, Stryker assigned you this?’

  ‘Right before he ran off for his court case. Was I supposed to check with you?’

  ‘It’s fine for now, but just let me know in future before you start something time-intensive.’ Elsie would have to have a word with Stryker on his return. Elsie couldn’t blame Matthews, Stryker outranked her. Leading from the middle of the team hadn’t worked as well as she had hoped. Perhaps Dad was right and you could only lead by doggedly staying ahead of the pack.

  ‘Sorry, boss. I’ll let you know next time. Is there something you’d rather I be working on?’

  ‘Keep going on this for now. Do you know where Knox has gone?’

  ‘I think she said she had a lead to run down. I don’t know what it is.’

  Great, Elsie thought. Another loose cannon to rein in. This team of hers was driving he
r mad. She exhaled deeply, the exhaustion getting to her once more.

  ‘Boss?’ Matthews said tentatively.

  What now? Matthews needed some serious handholding. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘You look exhausted all the time.’

  ‘That’s not a question,’ Elsie said, dodging the issue. Perhaps Matthews was more perceptive than she’d given her credit for.

  ‘I Googled your symptoms...’

  Of course, she had. There was no way a detective would just ignore it. ‘That’s pretty rude, Matthews.’

  ‘I’m sorry, boss, I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just... Well, my cousin’s got this chronic illness that makes her tired all the time.’

  Elsie mentally ticked off the many things that went wrong with her body on a daily basis – extreme and unpredictable fatigue, check, headaches, check, sore throat, check, dizziness when standing up, check, brain fog, check. Had Matthews cottoned on? The symptoms were quite generic.

  ‘You’ve got something like that, haven’t you?’

  ‘How’d you guess?’

  ‘You’re always tired,’ Matthews said. ‘You get this sort of defocused, glazed-over look in your eyes occasionally.’

  Elsie looked at her curiously. Most people couldn’t see it. They just saw a young woman in her prime and assumed that she was perfectly healthy.

  ‘I... nobody ever notices that.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Matthews said. ‘I shan’t tell a soul if you’re trying to keep it private though I know Stryker notices it too. He’s always looking at you when he thinks nobody is watching. It’s kinda cute.’

  He was? Elsie hadn’t noticed anything unprofessional... ‘I think it’s time to get back to work. Don’t you have a phone to crack?’

  WITH ELSIE GONE, MATTHEWS had the whole incident room to herself. The flurry of people coming and going had subsided as the initial energy behind the investigation began to taper off. The good news was that it freed up her Friday night. She’d debated cancelling her plans, but Knox had convinced her otherwise. ‘Work to live, Georgie,’ she’d texted early this morning. ‘Don’t live to work.’

  While it was solid advice, it was easier said than done, and it rankled hearing it from a woman who had given her everything to the Met. Perhaps that was why Knox was so keen that Matthews didn’t follow in her footsteps, she knew how much life in the force could steal.

  Mathews absent-mindedly turned over Nelly’s phone in her hands. It was older than most, a boring off-the-shelf black colour unlike Layla’s rose gold iPhone. It didn’t have a case on it and the number of scratches suggested it never had. A hairline crack ran down the top corner of the phone as if it had been dropped at least once.

  The battery was at full so it was time to start trying PIN numbers again.

  Birthdays were first. Beya Boileau had kindly provided a list of family members that Nelly was close to. Matthews had split them into the day day month month and month month year year format that she’d described to the boss. Beya’s own birth date, ninth January nineteen sixty-four had thus become 0901, 1964 and the much-less-likely 0164. Those birthdays were her ‘A’ list, the most likely to work.

  She tried each in turn.

  Nothing.

  It was a shame Nelly wasn’t one of the millions of people who used the most common PINs: 1234, 1111 and 0000 accounted for almost a fifth of PIN numbers. One report that Matthews had read suggested that just sixty-one combinations made up a third of all PINs, and 426 made up half. Repeating patterns like 1212 or 7777 were popular as were numbers that followed a pattern on a keyboard – 8520 sounded random until you realised those numbers formed the middle column of a standard keypad from top to bottom. People were almost always predictable. Unfortunately, Nelly Boileau was not one of them.

  Next were numbers with relevance to Nelly. Old house numbers, segments of old telephone numbers, even her high school locker number, were worth trying. Beya Boileau had come through on those numbers too.

  It took until Mathews’ D list to break in. She gingerly typed each, moving further and further down the list from most likely to least, until an off-the-wall thought came to her – 1962. It was famously the year of Algerian independence and the Boileau clan were French-Algerian.

  The phone unlocked.

  ‘Yes!’

  It was a clunky old phone. Matthews flicked through the apps. Nelly Boileau had been big on puzzle games. There was everything from Wordscapes to Scrabble. In a discreet folder on the fourth page of icons, Nelly had hidden all the dating apps: Bumble, Tinder, Plenty of Fish and, of course, Review My Ex. Each was locked behind another layer of passwords. Matthews had Googled for each website’s password policy and without fail they specified that passwords had to be at least eight letters long, alphanumeric, and have a mix of upper- and lower-case characters. There was no way that Matthews was going to guess that sort of password in the same way she’d worked out Nelly’s PIN code. Perhaps Ian could help crack those passwords if given enough time.

  The stuff that wasn’t hidden behind a second lock would have to suffice for now. The first thing Matthews looked at was Nelly’s photo gallery. She hoped to find a visual record of Nelly’s life – where she’d been, who she’d been with and what she’d done. If geotagging hadn’t been disabled then these photos could be overlaid on a map using the same technique that Knox had used to pin up a visual representation of the victims’ credit card transactions.

  The photos folder was surprisingly empty. There were virtually no selfies and everything was exceptionally vanilla. There were a few photos of Nelly’s family, mostly of her and Beya, an assortment of rainbows and sunsets all over London, and an album of memes and inspiring quotes that looked like they’d been saved from Instagram. Nothing in here matched up with the theory that Nelly was an out-of-control sugar baby with a cocaine habit. From the photos alone, the phone could have belonged to a teenage girl.

  The notes section, however, was a different matter. As soon as Matthews opened up the app she found dozens of locked notes. Re-entering the cracked pin code revealed all of them. She had saved explicit photos both of herself and of the men with whom she’d corresponded. Within the notes, Nelly had added comments like “£100 cash gift” underneath which presumably denoted how much the man in question had given her for sending the photo. The allegations were true. Nelly was on the take.

  A few taps took Matthews to Nelly’s phonebook. Here men were saved simply by initials. Some were simply “M” or “J” while others had the full two initials. Presumably, the monogrammed callers had been in Nelly’s phonebook for longer.

  It was a huge breakthrough. Any one of these men could be the Lady Killer. Matthews composed a quick email to Ian, the IT tech, with each phone number and asked him again if he’d help crack into the Review My Ex app. Some of phone numbers would no doubt be registered while all of the mobile phones with which the numbers were associated ought to be locatable through triangulation.

  DCI Mabey would be delighted with the progress. Matthews couldn’t wait to catch up with her. There was a Saturday morning briefing in the team’s electronic diary – the second working weekend in a row – and so she decided to wait until the morning to begin the arduous Trace, Interview, Eliminate process using the new suspect pool.

  First, she had a hot date.

  Chapter 37: Undressed

  It was nearing teatime and Stryker’s stomach was growling for his beloved Parmo. The dress had been delivered to an address in Richmond that belonged to one Lady Imelda, the wife of a Russian businessman who was infamous for fleecing the Russian state-owned oil company, Gazprom.

  Wherever the money had come from, it had been tastefully spent. Imelda’s house had a humble frontage on Montague Road that belied the period features within. She was only too happy to assist the Metropolitan Police with their inquiries. Stryker was whisked through to the open-plan living room which stretched from the front of
the house right through the kitchen to a beautiful Japanese garden out the back.

  ‘Lady Imelda,’ Stryker said. ‘I’m here to ask about a dress you commissioned.’

  ‘A dress?’ Imelda said. ‘Many dresses I purchase.’

  He showed her a photo of the Quadrozzi-designed black lace dress that Leonella Boileau had been found in.

  She dropped her head as if ashamed. ‘It was my expectation you might come. The dress... it is the one in the news?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Stryker said.

  ‘Such a shame,’ Imelda said. ‘It was a beautiful dress. Ruined now. The lace was flown in special from France. It is rather hard to find now.’

  That matched what the lab report had said. The lace was old-fashioned Leavers Lace, a labour-intensive way of making exceedingly fine fabric. This particular fabric was doubly expensive as it was spun from Mulberry silk made by Bombyx mori caterpillars. Expensive, durable, and nearly priceless.

  ‘Could you explain how your designer dress ended up at my crime scene?’

  ‘I gave it away. To the charity shop in town – the one which collects... I forget the name...’

  Stryker had to resist the urge to start Googling all the charity shops in Richmond. For such an upmarket residential neighbourhood, there were an awful lot.

  ‘When was this?’

  Imelda thought for a moment. ‘Months ago. They come to collect.’

  ‘Did they pick it up in a van? Perhaps with a logo or colour scheme on the side?’

  ‘Da, there was a green and white stripe on the side.’

  Bingo. Stryker apologised for neglecting the conversation and then used Google Maps to look along the nearby A305 where most of the charity shops were. Bingham Hospice leapt out at him immediately as matching the description. A green and white wave ran along the signage above the door. He showed his screen to Imelda.

  ‘Yes! That is the one.’

  ‘Thank you, Lady Imelda.’