The Phoenix Series Box Set 3

by Ted Tayler

  After assuring John Kelly they would have a word with the scrapyard owner in due course, the sergeant ended the conversation. The desk phone rang again at once.

  The officer made the obligatory introductions and asked the caller how he could be of service. The sentence that followed changed everything. Instead of a bored copper dealing with yet another annoying member of the public; his day got a lot brighter.

  “Hello, there; look, it might be nothing,” the voice began, “but I did a job for the council today.”

  And so, the reliance on breaking the walls of silence became less relevant. First thing in the morning, WPC Lizzie Burchell, and newly promoted Sergeant Paul Gattiker left Kilburn police station for Kelly’s scrapyard. Their presence wasn’t entirely welcomed, but Maurice Kelly was wary of unsettling the police or the Environment Agency any more than necessary. No way would he refuse to cooperate. It was likely to be a report of kids seen climbing over the fence to nick hubcaps. Items they used later as a Frisbee in the park.

  “How can I help you, officers?” he asked, giving them a broad smile.

  “Someone working for the Council spotted something suspicious by your back fence,” replied young Gattiker.

  “Kids?” asked Maurice.

  “Not this time, sir,” replied the sergeant.

  Maurice took an instant dislike to the little scrote. He looked twelve years old, and he talked posh. The sweat breaking out on Maurice Kelly’s brow suggested to Lizzie Burchell that the informant might be on to something.

  “The vantage point afforded by the cherry-picker enabled him to look into the cars piled up by the fence at the rear of your property,” the baby-faced sergeant continued. “You accept that the vehicles in the yard have been prepared for recycling by your operatives?”

  “It’s difficult to squash a car as flat as that under the heel of your boot, lad?” snapped Maurice. This was not going well. He needed that bottle of vodka.

  “Our informant compared one vehicle, near the top, with the rest of the pile and wondered why it showed far higher amounts of rust, compared to the rest.” Lizzie Burchell added. The three of them now stood directly in front of the offending stack of cars.

  “He couldn’t swear to the make and model,” said Paul Gattiker, “but he had never seen a white car, with what resembled an orange stripe. It felt wrong if you understand me?”

  “Then he saw a loose piece of fabric flapping in the breeze,” said Lizzie, “initially he thought the width of the material fitted with it being a seat-belt.”

  “The longer he looked, the more it felt something didn’t belong. It was an adhesive tape.”

  Paul Gattiker turned to Maurice Kelly.

  “How do you explain that, Mr Kelly?”

  Maurice shrugged.

  “You’d have to ask my lads. I wasn’t here that day.”

  “I think we need to investigate further, don’t you?” asked Paul. “Maybe we can go to your office and wait for our forensic people to arrive. We may need one of your staff to remove the cars above it, and then the white Audi A3 in question. We could be here for a while.”

  “How can you tell it’s an Audi,” snorted Maurice. “It’s a white pancake, twenty feet off the ground.”

  “Just a hunch, sir,” said Paul Gattiker, “the previous owner contacted the station. He said he asked you to salvage treasured souvenirs within hours of dropping off the vehicle. His messages were ignored, so he complained.”

  The three of them stepped inside the office building. Maurice Kelly felt the walls closing in on him.

  “I’m not saying another word,” he muttered and slumped into his chair.

  The forensic team arrived within the hour. Kelly’s staff removed the top crushed vehicles from the pile, and the CSI team went to work on the Audi A3 once it was lowered to the ground. In the days that followed, the excessive rust proved to be blood. Blood that used to course through the veins of Michael Devlin. They had little trouble making the match, his frequent brushes with the law meant the police possessed an awful lot of knowledge on the hapless victim.

  Mairead Devlin received notification of the discovery of her husband’s body. Family liaison officers who delivered the news dissuaded her from viewing the collection of shattered bones, flesh and clothing the forensic team retrieved at the scene. Her children gathered around the matriarch and the family grieved the loss of the murdered father, grandfather, and former villain.

  The South Kilburn estate overflowed with speculation on who had been responsible for his death. Rumours that Devlin had been responsible for the arrests earlier in the year were now confirmed to be true. The person most affected by those arrests, apart from the low-level criminals themselves who were now in prison, was Tommy O’Riordan.

  Tommy heard the news concerning Devlin. He was disappointed with Maurice Kelly. He had paid him well. Why didn’t he get rid of the car? Tommy called Sean Walsh and ordered a punishment beating when the dust settled on affairs at the scrapyard.

  Tommy still believed he had nothing to fear. He covered his tracks. Nothing could trace back to his door. The police and the people on the estate could point the finger as much as they wished but proving his involvement would be a different kettle of fish. Colleen got fed up with the dirty looks she got from neighbours, and shop staff. She asked Tommy whether they could have a holiday.

  “Why can’t we go over to Marbella, to see the kids? They’re always asking when we’re going to go over to spend time with them.”

  Tommy thought about it. What was stopping them? Sean could keep things running while they went away. This fuss would be over in days.

  Tommy and Colleen flew to Malaga from Stansted the following afternoon.

  The forensic examination of the Audi continued. The sad news had to be relayed to John and Carol Kelly, that Rick Springfield was beyond help. Carol felt tearful for a few days, but John bought her a retro record player and fetched her vinyl collection from the attic. She was soon reacquainted with ‘Affair of the Heart’, ‘Jessie’s Girl’, and the rest of her heartthrob’s greatest hits. John disappeared to his shed at the bottom of the garden more often than in the past but trips out in their new Honda Jazz became more enjoyable. At least the radio had more variety.

  Meanwhile, in the forensic department, they grasped at the last few straws left to examine. They needed a lucky break.

  Dumb luck did for Tommy O’Riordan in the end.

  It was that flapping piece of tape that caught the eye of the sub-contractor working on the streetlights behind the scrapyard. As the CSI team teased more and more parts of the mangled Audi apart, they determined that Michael Devlin had been wrapped in the orange plastic sheeting. Sheeting still visible, as a thin stripe, even after the compactor had done its work.

  Part of the tape securing the sheeting wrapped around the dead body had come loose. It was a painstaking job, but in the end, they recovered several sections of tape-covered sheeting. In the laboratory, they tested them for fingerprints. The results drew a blank. Another blank to put alongside the others from the wreckage of the Audi, and from the four corners of the scrapyard.

  Teresa Green, a twenty-three-year-old trainee, who cursed her parents every day for her first name, stared at a section of orange sheeting and its attached grey tape. What was she seeing? Had the killer joined these two pieces of tape?

  Whoever wrapped the body, it proved impossible to use one continuous length. They had to break a strip off, then seal it; and then tear another strip from the roll, to continue wrapping.

  No fingerprints were found anywhere in or on the car; so, the killer or killers must have worn gloves. How did they break the tape? Did they cut it with a knife or scissors? It was obvious that they hadn’t removed their gloves to tear it across the width. It was uneven, so it wasn’t a clean cut.

  Teresa knew what she always did when faced with a similar problem at Christmas; when wrapping an odd-shaped present. She nicked it with her teeth first, then it was easier to tear
. Even if it didn’t always stay dead straight,

  It might be worth testing for DNA. Teresa swabbed the area around the join. Now they had to wait for ten days to a fortnight to get the results. It was a longshot, but all they had.

  Tommy O’Riordan lay on a sun lounger on the balcony, basking in the sun. Colleen had gone shopping. The children were both at work. The four of them planned to go out for a meal together this evening. It had been their routine over the past couple of weeks. The children had wondered if, and when their parents were leaving.

  Tommy had made himself at home. He had bumped into a few old colleagues living out their retirement years in Marbella. Who says crime doesn’t pay? Maybe he was thinking of quitting the game and moving here on a permanent basis?

  Colleen trotted back into the apartment, loaded with designer label bags. She looked forward to showing Tommy what she had bought, then joining him on a lounger with a glass of wine, for the rest of the afternoon.

  “Alright, sweetheart?” she purred.

  “Mustn’t grumble,” Tommy replied, “fetch us a bottle of lager from the fridge, darling.”

  Colleen dumped her bags on one of the large leather sofas and trotted off to the kitchen.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Who’s that now, I wonder,” she groaned. The colour drained from her tanned face when she opened the door. Five armed men burst into the flat. Two plain-clothes police officers followed them inside waving warrant cards.

  Tommy heard the noise and was still getting his bulky frame up from the lounger when the armed men arrived on the balcony. He wore a pair of swim shorts, flip-flops, and sunglasses. Tommy saw the guns pointed at him and grinned.

  “First day in the sun, lads? You’re looking red-faced. Get my brief on the phone, Colleen. I can’t imagine what you’re doing here.”

  The two detectives pushed their way through onto the balcony.

  “Thomas Henry O’Riordan, you’re under arrest for the murder of Michael Devlin...”

  “Bollocks,” shouted Tommy, “you’ve got nothing on me, copper, and you know it. This is just a fishing expedition. Yeah, red-faced is right. I reckon.”

  DI Jonathan Barclay smiled.

  “We have your DNA on the tape you used to wrap his body. If you used a knife or scissors, you might have got away with it. You used your teeth to cut the tape between strips. The saliva you left behind has done for you. Schoolboy error.”

  Tommy re-ran the scene in the workshop from that afternoon in his head. The sick feeling in his stomach spread. How stupid had he been? He had got out of there as fast as possible. The stench was terrible. He couldn’t be bothered to walk to the work table to hunt for something with which to cut the bloody tape. What dumb luck!

  Six months later, Tommy O’Riordan would stand in the dock at the Central Criminal Court. The murder weapon was never discovered. For weeks, DI Barclay and his squad only had the DNA on the tape as evidence.

  O’Riordan had plenty of motive; nobody could dispute that. Despite his being at his mother’s wake the night before, he still had the opportunity. The only people who could give him an alibi for the afternoon in question were unreliable witnesses. His brothers and sisters were economical with the truth by nature. Colleen, his beloved wife, said he never left the house.

  “Well, she would, wouldn’t she?” Barclay when he met with the prosecution’s brief.

  “We could do with more,” the lawyer said. “Is there nobody on the estate prepared to talk?”

  “They’re not lining up around the corner, no,” admitted Jonathan Barclay. “Still, there’s time yet for us to get a break in the case.”

  A week later it arrived, in the shape of Maurice Kelly. In truth, Maurice wasn’t in good shape at the time. He had recently left the hospital. Sean Walsh sent his heavies to the scrapyard late one Friday afternoon.

  They said they had a message from Tommy O’Riordan. Leaving the Audi on site for six weeks with Michael Devlin’s body inside had been a mistake. They left him with fractures in more places than he could count on his fingers.

  An eye-socket, his nose, half a dozen ribs required treatment. His ten fingers had been broken too, which hindered his counting. Maurice Kelly still hurt, but with O’Riordan on remand, having been judged a flight risk, he decided a word with the authorities might help his own cause.

  The police questioned him over his involvement in Devlin’s murder. He told them he had travelled to Nantwich that night. They checked and confirmed it was impossible for him to have been in the yard later than two in the afternoon. Kelly agreed to give the police a statement, provided they looked after him.

  “Do you have a big family, Maurice?” asked DI Barclay.

  “Not around here,” he replied, “they’re either back home in Ireland, or dead. It’s just me and the wife.”

  “We’ll look at getting you into witness protection if what you tell us is of any value.”

  DI Barclay didn’t want to take any chances. If Maurice helped clinch the case against O’Riordan, he would offer him personal protection twenty-four seven. Arrests and conviction of criminals such as Tommy O’Riordan made people’s careers.

  “Tommy was in my office that afternoon. I’ll swear to that. I had to drive to Nantwich, and he was still here when I left. He went to the workshop.”

  “Was he alone?” asked Jonathan Barclay.

  Maurice knew Sean Walsh was still at large in the neighbourhood. Tommy hadn’t talked throughout his time in custody. The police had found nothing to link Walsh to the murder.

  “There was nobody else here,” Maurice replied.

  “Who brought Devlin here in the first place?” asked the inspector.

  “No idea,” shrugged Maurice, “I sent the lads home at one o’clock because we weren’t that busy, and I had to drive up north. Tommy arrived in the afternoon and said he would pay me for using the workshop for an hour or two. I wanted nothing to do with whatever he planned. He told me to keep my mouth shut about him being there, and to make myself scarce. That’s what I did.”

  “How did you receive the injuries that put you in the hospital?” Barclay asked.

  “In my line of business, people always reckon they’ve had a raw deal. It’s a hard game in which to make a living. I won’t deny that I’m no saint. Any of half a dozen customers could have thought I’d ripped them off. I never saw the faces of the two thugs that hurt me. They wore masks.”

  DI Barclay didn’t believe a word of it; but once Kelly’s statement was tidied up, and signed, it would be the clincher they needed.

  After the trial that ended on the twenty-third of April found Tommy O’Riordan guilty, Maurice Kelly’s scrapyard closed for business. His staff got laid off. The site cleared, and a ‘For Sale’ notice posted on the fence outside the gates. He and his wife Dierdre never surfaced again in North London, nor anywhere in Britain.

  Hugo Hanigan seethed with frustration in his penthouse suite in the nation’s capital. In the beautiful Somerset countryside at Larcombe Manor, the hunt was on to confirm that the series of murders before Easter had been linked. Hugo planned more atrocities to signal the control The Grid had over the country’s criminal affairs. Olympus was several steps behind him.

  Phoenix had been right. Evil was just around the corner. Olympus had to play ‘catch-up’, and any delay in identifying the megalomaniac banker could prove fatal.

  CHAPTER 4

  Thursday, 24th April 2014

  In the ice-house, Giles Burke and Artemis were hard at work. Their official shift started at eight o’clock, but Giles had called last night to suggest a six o’clock start. Artemis didn’t need asking twice. They had an important task, and Phoenix had insisted they take time yesterday to catch up on their sleep. No point in wasting any more time.

  “We need to get as much information on these murders as we can, Giles,” she said. “Try to discover what lay behind them before the morning meeting. One hour investigating it will only allow us to scratch the sur
face, but an earlier start might help us bring something useful to the table for nine o’clock. I’ll be there at six.”

  Artemis had slipped from under the duvet at half-past five. Rusty snored in peace beside her. She saw no point in disturbing her partner this early. They had spent their half-day off in this bedroom.

  Their working patterns for Olympus often meant they were apart for days on end. It had become second nature to grab every opportunity to show how much they meant to one other. The cold shower woke her up, and her mind was on full alert when she descended to the ice-house control centre in the lift.

  In the nine months that Artemis had worked at Larcombe, there were many crises to face. Despite that, she wouldn’t swap her current role for her old job in the police service for love or money. Despite the dangers, Rusty confronted whenever his missions took him outside into the big, bad world. They were together, that’s what mattered, and she always believed at least, here with Olympus, she made a difference.

  Giles had greeted her with a smile, when the lift doors closed in their smooth and silent manner behind her, “Good morning, Artemis. I hope you’re rested?”

  “After a fashion,” she grinned back, “so, what time did Maria Elena leave? Or is she still in the stable block?”

  “Provided the alarm wakes her in time to get to the main house to collect Hope before nine, she’ll be fine,”

  With the preliminaries dealt with they set to work. Over the months, it had become plain they made a good team. Giles, the computer wizard with the ability to sift through masses of data gathered from the Olympus systems and isolate flecks of gold dust. Giles’s expertise enabled the organisation to work with supreme effect.

  Artemis had been a bright, ambitious young detective sergeant with more ability than her role ever demanded of her. Since being at Larcombe, her acute, intuitive intelligence had sprouted wings. She thrived on the pressure; and enjoyed the challenge of making the disparate elements they uncovered fit into place. When they put their heads together, answers to insurmountable problems soon got resolved.