He smiled. We can certainly do that, he thought. Time I turned over a new leaf and stopped succumbing to temptation. It had been a close call, too close, not something he wanted to repeat. It had been the thought of losing Mo and all that came with her that had driven him to dealing with Trisha McVie in the way he had. It was time to draw a line under it, become a good boy and a better cop.
Chapter Thirty-Six
When Gus Brooke had left the SCF offices shortly before seven on Friday evening, prior to dumping Trisha McVie’s body, Rosselli was in his hotel room performing the daily ritual of cleaning his Glock 30 handgun and his long-range sniper rifle. He looked up as his phone sounded an alert: Detective Constable Brooke’s car was on the move.
Before carefully wrapping the weapons and returning them to the safety of his high-security metal case, he quickly checked the car’s location. It was heading out of Nottingham towards Rappington; Brooke was going home.
The weapons stowed, Rosselli idly stroking Goccia’s head as he sat watching the moving blue dot on the screen. When it turned into the lane leading to the factory, he smiled.
“It looks as if he is still interested in the derelict industrial site, little one. Look, his car has stopped outside.”
Less than a minute later, when the blue dot started to move again, Rosselli nodded. “Interesting. I wonder what he’s up to. But whatever he was doing, he now appears to be heading for his house. I think it’s time for another walk through the fields and woods. If tonight is the night he intends to dump the body, I want to be there to see him load it into the car.”
It was almost dark by the time Rosselli arrived at his spot in the Brookes’ garden, Goccia obediently and silently waiting at his side. The cottage was ablaze with light, but none of it reached him; he could watch and wait undetected.
From the activity in the cottage it appeared that Brooke was cleaning the same upstairs bathroom he had already devoted hours to. Although Rosselli applauded the diligence, he felt it was borne out of fear rather than cold common sense: Brooke was terrified of missing something that might later incriminate him.
Soon after nine thirty, the kitchen door opened and Brooke emerged dressed entirely in black. After releasing the tailgate of his car, which he had reversed into position to ensure it was close to both the garage and kitchen doors, he hurried to the garage.
Rosselli turned to Goccia and put his fingers to his lips. She obliged by hunkering down and resting her chin on her front paws.
After some muffled scraping sounds from inside the garage, Brooke appeared at the garage door, carrying the wrapped body in his arms. He paused, listening for any noises from the road. Hearing nothing, he continued on to the car and carefully placed the body in the boot.
Leaving the car’s tailgate up, Brooke hurried back to the garage to fetch two large bin liners which he draped over the white towels wrapping the body. Once he had finished in the car, he returned again to the garage where Rosselli heard him tidying the interior. It didn’t take long and soon Brooke was back indoors, the car, garage and garden left in silence and darkness.
Half-an-hour later, all the lights in the house went out. When Brooke didn’t emerge, Rosselli assumed he had gone to bed. Dumping the body in the early hours of the morning would make more sense than doing it now when there might be witnesses to his movements. Nevertheless, he patiently waited fifteen more minutes before emerging from his hiding place. With Goccia padding along beside him, he walked silently towards the detective’s car and gently clicked the tailgate release. He lifted the door and pulled the bin liners to one side. There wasn’t much light, but it didn’t matter. Rosselli had an app on his phone that accumulated dozens of exposures in poor light and made a half-reasonable job of rendering an image. However, it did involve holding the phone still, which he achieved by pushing it against the padded roof above the body before hitting the shutter release. Four attempts later he had some acceptable shots. He would have preferred flash, but he didn’t want to risk anything that might draw Brooke’s attention to his presence, and anyway, the shots were only an insurance against possible resistance from the principal player in his plot.
After carefully putting the bin liners back in place over the body, he decided that rather than make his way back across the fields and through the woods in total darkness, he would risk walking with Goccia along the road to the track where he had left his car.
Settling the pug in her basket on the rear seat, he removed her lead and fed her one of the small nibbles she loved. “Well done, tesoro, you were so quiet, an angel. We can go back to our hotel now. When the misguided detective heads off in the darkness to dump the superintendent’s body, the little bug on his car will tell us exactly where he has gone, and since he went there earlier this evening, I think we know where that will be. We can visit in our own time to make further preparations.”
A ping from his phone awoke Rosselli at 4:08 on Saturday morning, alerting him that Gus Brooke’s car was moving once again. He sat up in bed and switched on the bedside light, but a suspicious growl from Goccia, who sensed the unexpected activity had nothing to do with her being taken for a walk, saw him quickly turn it off again.
“Go back to sleep, principessa, I’ll take you out later.”
From the comfort of his bed, Rosselli watched the blue flashing marker on the map move from Brooke’s cottage, pass through Rappington and take the lane towards the factory. There was a pause while Brooke opened the gates, after which the marker moved inside the factory perimeter, paused again, and then moved towards the enclosed yard. When it stopped short of entering the yard, Rosselli nodded his approval.
“Hidden from the lane; our young detective is learning,” he whispered quietly, not wanting to disturb Goccia again.
If the bug on the car remained stationary for more than ten minutes, the app was programmed to ping with the next movement, which it duly did nearly fifty minutes later once Brooke had hidden Trisha McVie’s body and began driving back to the cottage.
Rosselli had been dozing, knowing he could rely on the app, but he was instantly alert as he watched the progress of the car back to the cottage.
“Fifty-six minutes, Goccia,” he said, but not loudly enough to wake his sleeping pug. “Efficient, but given Detective Brooke is an amateur, rather too efficient. I suspect he will have made a few mistakes. We’ll see when the coast is clear.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The house-to-house enquiries on Saturday morning produced no information of any relevance. No sightings of the Golf the previous Tuesday evening, no one acting suspiciously, no one who saw Trisha McVie. Nothing. A frustrated Len Crawford sought the DCS’s approval for widening the radius of the search into Saturday afternoon, but still there was nothing.
The choice of the derelict factory to dump the car puzzled Jennifer. It couldn’t be random; whoever made that choice must have known it was deserted and not well secured. As well as her routine questions, she also asked what people knew about the factory, whether they had heard anything about any activity up there.
“It was interesting,” she told Derek later that afternoon when they met back at the SCF HQ. “The older residents in Rappington, the more well-to-do ones who have lived there for donkey’s years, couldn’t say a good word about the place. Some of them remembered it being built in a boom in the early sixties, moaned about it bringing heavy lorries through the village destroying their peace and quiet and lowering the tone of the place.”
Derek pulled a face. “I wasn’t aware it had a tone to lower. It’s a real non-entity of a village. Nothing pretty about it even with the pond near the church.”
“P’raps it was better back then,” said Jennifer.
She grinned knowingly at him. “You know, you should have bent their ears when you were looking into the place earlier this year, they might have saved you some time. None of them knew of any activity there, no cars at strange times, no vehicles at all, in fact. Several of them walk their dogs aroun
d there but they all took the chains on the gates at face value, assumed they were actually doing something and not just window dressing. You missed out on good intelligence from their neighbourhood watch.”
“Possibly, but I think Crawford reckoned the locals might have been involved, didn’t want to frighten them off.”
“Most of the oldies I spoke to were hardly likely to have been involved in drug manufacture, and I don’t think porn would be good for their collective blood pressure.”
Derek laughed. “Good point. I agree with you, though, I think the chances are that it’s someone local. Have you talked to Gus? I mean, he’s lived there for a few months, he must have had some conversations in the local pub, got to know a few people.”
“I haven’t, no, but I will. I must admit that I still find it strange that he didn’t say anything about living nearby when the Golf was found.”
“P’raps he assumed everyone knew.”
The shrill of Derek’s desk phone interrupted their conversation.
“DC Thyme. Oh, hi, mate, how’re you doing? I haven’t seen you at the track for a while. Everything OK?”
“Everything’s fine with me, Derek, yeah.” replied Leroy Crosby, a forensic scientist from Forefront Forensics whom Derek knew from their shared passion for athletics. “But me kid’s been sick and with the missus about to pop with number two, I haven’t had time,”
“Probably haven’t had permission, either, I should guess,” joked Derek.
“Tell me about it.”
“Anyway, what can I do for you, mate?” said Derek. “Don’t you know it’s Saturday afternoon?”
“The service is twenty-four seven here at Forefront Forensics,” said Leroy, singing out the advertising slogan in a theatrical voice. “Actually, the hours are all over the place for me at the mo. I was off half of yesterday owing to a false alarm from Minnie. But I did have time to put something on for an overnight analysis that I thought looked interesting. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Well, I was wondering. Was Trisha McVie a cyclist?”
“A cyclist? Don’t think so. Hang on, Jen’s here. I’ll ask.”
Derek put the handset into his shoulder and turned to Jennifer.
“It’s Leroy from the lab. He wants to know if Trish was a cyclist.”
Jennifer shook her head. “No, not unless she was keeping it from me.”
Derek spoke back into the phone. “Jen says no.”
“But perhaps she owns a bike?” suggested Leroy.
“Own a bike?” said Derek to Jennifer.
“No.”
“No, mate, she didn’t. What’s this about?”
“Well,” said Leroy, “when I examined the Golf interior yesterday, I found a trace of oil on the edge of the tailgate, right next to the door trim, just left of centre. It was missed during the first examination, but when I used a laser light, I spotted it.
“As I said, I was called away in the afternoon, but I left a sample to be analysed overnight on the GC/MS and the results are interesting.”
“Enlighten me,” said Derek, his eagerness sounding in his voice.
“It’s a complex mixture,” explained Leroy. “Dozens of components and it’s contaminated as well. But from the various databases I’ve looked at, I’d say it’s pretty definitely a high-grade lube oil, the kind a dedicated cyclist would use on the chain of a road bike or a mountain bike.”
Derek frowned. “How would it get in the car?”
He looked up to see Jennifer issuing silent questions to him, impatient to hear what Leroy had to say. He held up his hand to stop her and turned his attention back to the scientist.
“Probably from lifting a bike either in or out of the car,” continued Leroy. “Depending on the car, it’s not always easy to do without part of the bike touching something. Especially at the end of a ride when you’re knackered. You must have done it.”
“In my car!” said an incredulous Derek. “It would be easier to fit my Mini into my bike than my bike into my Mini.”
“Right,” replied Leroy, laughing, “but you know what I mean. That stuff sticks like dag to a sheep, as an Australian ex-girlfriend of mine used to say. Mind you, this was a tiny amount. I reckon the boot must have had something spread over it to protect it. What I’ve found must have missed the cover, or maybe a pedal was contaminated with it from the chain or front cogs and touched the rim of the well as the bike was lifted in or out.”
“So you obviously think it’s significant.”
“If there’s no other explanation, yes, it could be.”
“Thanks, Leroy, that’s bloody brilliant.”
He put the phone down and explained to Jennifer what Leroy had found.
“I’m ninety-nine per cent sure about Trish not having a bike,” she said. “But we can confirm it easily enough. A team from her old squad is going to her place in London this afternoon. Probably there now. I’ll call them, get them to double-check about a bike.”
She tapped some numbers on her phone.
“You know what this means, Derek?” she said, as she waited to be connected.
“Yeah, of course. It means that whoever dumped her took a bike with him as well so he could get home.”
“Which is good and bad news … hang on.” She spoke into the phone and explained what she wanted to know. The answer came back immediately.
“OK,” continued Jennifer as she closed the call. “Confirmed; Trish didn’t have a bike.”
“Why is it good news and bad news?”
“Think about it. It’s good news because it narrows the search to a cyclist, probably one with a quality bike. It’s also good news because it means there’s only one person involved, which certainly makes sense.”
“And bad news?”
“It’s bad news because it widens the search area enormously. We might not be dealing with someone from around Rappington at all; they just needed to know about the factory. They could have come from, I don’t know, up to twenty miles away. Maybe more.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
After Gus Brooke had dumped Trisha McVie’s body, Rosselli continued to monitor the detective’s car throughout the day. He needed to know where the police were occupying themselves before he felt he could safely visit the factory and begin his preparations.
It quickly became obvious that Brooke and many other detectives were conducting house-to-house enquiries, starting close to Rappington and working outwards. The large search group was criss-crossing the area and although they didn’t move back to the factory site, Rosselli felt they were too close for comfort. He would wait at least another day.
On checking his app on Sunday morning, Rosselli was surprised to see Brooke’s car in Beeston, a suburb of Nottingham on the other side of the River Trent from Rappington. A quick trip to spy out activity confirmed what he thought: the search had been expanded to cover other areas. Something must have happened to persuade the police to look farther afield and, more importantly, they obviously still had no suspicions about Detective Constable Brooke.
With the police now occupied elsewhere, Rosselli drove to the factory and found it deserted. The gates were secured with a padlock that would have only taken him seconds to open. However, it would be too risky to drive his car into the site but neither could he leave it outside in full view of anyone who happened by. He would have to leave his car in the village and return to the site using the same path alongside the irrigation channel that he had taken the previous Wednesday, when the area had been alive with police activity.
After parking his car in Rappington village in the small space hidden from the main road behind the village church, Rosselli clipped Goccia’s lead to her collar and the pair set off. For Goccia, the walk was even more exciting than before since a number of police dogs had taken the same route and left their delicious scent behind. As she nuzzled her way along the grass bordering the wire mesh fence that defined the limit of the factory site, she pull
ed harder against the lead, as if she wanted to tunnel under the fence. She stopped and gave a low whine.
“What is it, my little bloodhound? What have you found?” asked Rosselli as his attention fell on the fence. “Oh, Goccia, you clever girl. Where would I be without you? You’ve found us a way in.”
He bent over and carefully separated the mesh at the same spot Gus Brooke had used after he dumped the Golf. It was well interwoven, giving the appearance of being one continuous stretch of mesh, but it gave easily to his fingers. Seconds later Rosselli and Goccia were inside the fence and Rosselli was closing the breach.
“Come, cara,” he said, glancing up and down the path, “we’re a little exposed here; there might be other strollers and their dogs.”
He hurried towards the factory buildings, skirting them until he reached the far side and the internal road that led from the main gates through the large vehicular access passage to the central yard. Looking up before he walked into the passage, he saw the faded sign.
“The factory?” he read. “Couldn’t the owners have thought of something more imaginative to call it?”
Staying in the shadows, he continued through the passage to the yard and then on to a pair of double doors that served as the main entrance.
For the next three hours, Rosselli made a meticulous examination of the derelict buildings, assessing them from his own point of view as a possible place of execution for Jennifer Cotton, and also to find where Gus Brooke had hidden Trisha McVie’s body.
For the execution, after considering several possibilities, he decided that a large, open area on the upper floor of the rear building would be ideal. The area had once been a reception and dispatch area for consignments of goods in small crates. These would have been hoisted from the ground floor loading bay below and transferred to a pulley system running on girder rails rigged ten feet from the floor. It was the hoists and rails that attracted Rosselli’s attention along with the rusted and compromised safety rails designed to prevent anyone falling from the edge of the area and tumbling five metres into the loading bay.
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