Her Silent Obsession: An addictive and gripping crime thriller (Detective Arla Baker Series Book 6)

by ML Rose

  “Sit inside the crime scene just because I’m pregnant? Not very professional, is it?”

  Harry made a grunting sound in his throat, which meant he was annoyed. “I’m sure Rebecca Stone won’t see it like that.”

  “No way.” Arla shook her head resolutely. “Just hurry up. I’ll be fine.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Harry used the side entrance and stopped at the door of the annex apartment. This was the housekeeper’s residence. He rang the bell, but there was no answer. Edna Mildred was likely inside the main house, working. Harry had gloves on and he depressed the door handle. It was locked. There was no sign of a break-and-enter. Two windows faced him and the curtains were drawn. There was no sign of tampering at the windows either.

  He walked to the end of the side passage, with the fence on his right. To his left the patio opened up, continuing all the way to the fence on the other side. He observed the snow for a while, virginal apart from the pawprints of a solitary fox. He went down to his knees and cast his eyes over the stone slabs of the patio. The earlier sunshine had faded and a bank of clouds gave the daylight a dull, greyish glow. Harry shone his torch up and down the patio stones. Satisfied there weren’t any boot prints or marks on them, he stepped up to the first stone and then walked down.

  From the concertina doors that made up the back wall of the kitchen, a flight of stone steps went down into the garden. He realised the patio stones were heated as well, including the steps. Molten snow had run off the patio, sliding into the steps. He nodded to himself. Since he had first looked out at the garden, he’d wondered why the snow did not settle on the patio. True, there was a portico just below the bathroom window, but that only covered a small part of the patio that ran the full length of the house. Now that he stood here, wisps of steam rose all around him, signifying the heating was still on. He was satisfied one puzzle which had been bothering him had been cracked.

  He went to the edge of the patio and, standing on his tip-toes, used his considerable height to scan as far down the garden as he could. Still no footprints. He came to the edge of the patio, shining the torch beam into every nook and cranny. He located the garden shed. It was shut by a latchkey from the outside, but not locked. He opened the door and stepped inside the rickety wooden structure. His six-feet-four frame couldn’t stand up straight. Stooping low, he looked around for a light switch, then realised there was none.

  The shed only held gardening tools, including a lawnmower. On the floor lay a couple of large toolboxes. Harry kneeled and snapped open the locks. He shone the torch inside the toolboxes, taking out the layers of screwdrivers. He didn’t find anything remotely interesting. He examined the ends of the screwdrivers for traces of blackened blood or any other human residue. He found nothing. He didn’t expect to find anything; after all, any perpetrator would get rid of the evidence. But he had seen stranger things in his time.

  And as his boss, now soon to be the mother of his child, loved to say: An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

  He came out of the shed and walked back to the patio, his boots leaving deep prints in the snow. He traversed the entire length of the patio and came to the end where it sloped off towards a small fence which came up to his waist. A sliver of land ran between this fence and the next property. A bank of conifers shielded that property from the Stone residence.

  Harry looked at the snow-covered land and shook his head. Again, all he saw was the footprints of a small animal, either a fox or a cat. No human prints were visible anywhere. He walked over to the fence. It was steady and not hard to climb over. He didn’t. He walked up and down its length, hoping he wasn’t disturbing evidence that lay buried under the snow. The fence hadn’t been tampered with in any way. Snow lay heavy on the nude branches in the woods behind. The skeleton branches reached out to him like spindly, shapeless, bony arms, almost beseeching for warmth and greenery.

  Harry’s eyes scanned the frigid, white earth stretching to the woods, then took in the trees themselves. He couldn’t make out a great deal. He climbed over the fence and walked down. Luckily, the snow hadn’t started again. The tip of his nose was going numb and he rubbed it with a gloved hand. He came to the edge of the woods and stood there for a while. The interior was gloomy and dark, with some evergreen undergrowth interspersed with rotten leaves and fallen branches.

  He looked back at the footprints he had left behind. Then he waded into the undergrowth. It was tough. Like claws, twigs scratched at his face, pulled at his hair. Harry cursed and used his gloved hands to pull down as much of the dense shrubbery as he could.

  After he had gone in roughly ten feet, he stopped. He shone his light around. This was heavy going, and he couldn’t imagine a man carrying a baby going through this. A chill spread down his spine, freezing his heart. Harry was no stranger to the viciousness and cruelty of the human mind, but the thought of that new-born baby being left out here in the cold filled him with a desolate despair. He shivered as looked around, flashing his torch.

  There was nothing but glistening, black undergrowth and vines that lay twisted on the ground. They entwined around his feet, making movement difficult. Harry lifted his boots, smashing more branches out of the way. When he stopped, the silence was total, not a whisper to be heard anywhere. All of nature’s sounds were withdrawn deep into the breast of its dark, cold heart. It was futile to look around any further. Harry trudged back the way he came, glad to leave this frigid, forsaken place.

  Arla was waiting in the car, scribbling in her notebook. She looked up as Harry came back. He deposited the wellies in the boot, changed into his shoes, and opened the driver’s door.

  “How did it go?” Arla asked. “Not much, right?” She hadn’t seen any footprints from the upper-floor windows, and doubted Harry would have uncovered a lot more. But she knew Harry’s sharp eyes wouldn’t have missed much.

  “There’s no way out the back. Not unless you’ve got a machete. In which case, the perp would’ve left a gash wide enough for me to see. Maybe get the drone up here, and also try to tackle the woods from behind.”

  Arla took her phone out and, turning on the map function, honed down to her location. “Another row of multimillion-pound mansions behind those woods. Their gardens back on to it, just like this house does.”

  Harry frowned. “No way out, in other words. That makes the woods an unlikely escape route, unless. . . .” His words died out as the horrible, macabre vision rose in his mind again. He shivered. Arla stared at him, then reached out to squeeze his hand.

  “No, I don’t think he went down there.” She shook her head. “He went out some other way. Look, there’s a boot print on the bathroom windowsill, so someone entered the house. The nursery window was open and there’s a boot print on the flat roof right below it, so we know he went down that way too.”

  “With the baby.”

  “Yes,” Arla agreed.

  “But how did he do it without leaving any footprints in the snow? Even if he cleaned up behind himself, the snow would be disturbed.”

  Arla rubbed her fingers thoughtfully under her chin. “Did you do a full circle and come round the left side?”

  “Yes, I did. The left side is full of snow and, again, I saw an animal’s small pawprints. But nothing else.”

  “Then it is a mystery,” Arla conceded. “I don’t like mysteries.” She frowned and pursed her lips together.

  “Okay, Harry. Please ask Rebecca one last time if her husband is back. If not, tell him to come down to the station to give a statement as soon as he returns. But given that these folks are blue-blooded, they’ll probably want us to come back here for another statement.”

  “Okay.” Harry opened the driver’s door a fraction. “You wanted the details of her mother and sister as well, right?”

  “Yes. And don’t forget the photos of Jeremy and the new baby.”

  CHAPTER 11

  It was a peculiarity of human nature, Arla mused, that violent crime and homicide cases tap
ered down in the winter and increased in the summer. As a result, there were a lot of bored faces at the detectives’ open-plan office. Inspectors and sergeants stood around chatting to each other. The incident room had not seen any action for almost a month, an unheard-of statistic in the summer months. Lisa and Roslyn May, the new detective sergeant from the Midlands, were sat together, staring at Roslyn’s laptop screen. As Arla got closer, she realised they were shopping for shoes.

  “Not disturbing anything, am I?”

  Both sergeants jumped. Arla had approached them stealthily from behind. Roslyn lay a hand on her chest. “Geez, guv, you scared the life out of me.”

  “Good to see you’re keeping busy,” Arla teased.

  Roslyn flushed. She was hard-working and conscientious and Arla liked her.

  “We were wondering where you were, and if everything was all right and—”

  Arla laughed and stopped her. “I’m only joking. Where’s Rob?”

  Lisa pointed to one corner, where Rob and three other detectives were sat in a circle. As Arla watched, one of them leaned back and laughed out loud. The man who laughed at his own joke was Justin Beauregard. Justin had always been jealous of Arla’s stellar rise up the ranks. He believed he should have been detective chief inspector before her, despite Arla’s track record. She noticed that Rob was serious and down-faced as Justin and two other detective inspectors carried on laughing. In silence, Rob rose and walked back to his desk. Arla caught his attention and waved him over.

  “What do they find so funny?” she asked.

  Rob had a portly figure and a balding head. His chubby cheeks wore a hint of crimson as he shuffled on his feet and cleared his throat. “Oh, just this and that.”

  Arla narrowed her eyes. She could tell when Rob was lying.

  “To my office, now.” Arla set off. She took a circuitous route, deliberately walking past Justin’s table.

  The laughter stopped, and when she glanced out of the corner of her eye, she could see Justin smirking at her. She ignored him, but didn’t like it. Justin was a seasoned senior detective. All the years he had spent in the murky underbelly of London’s grimy streets had made him a tough cop. But he was known to cut corners, and although Arla could never prove it, she suspected he had planted evidence in the past, in order to secure a prosecution. She had heard it from criminals she had successfully persecuted herself.

  The corridors of crime in this secretive city rang with whispers of buried guilt, forgotten crimes, and voices that spoke from beyond the grave. Arla knew her job as a policewoman was to listen for these secrets. A copper’s job wasn’t unlike that of a doctor, who gets to know the disease better than she knows the patient. Otherwise, she cannot treat the disease. Arla suspected strongly that the disease of corruption had touched Justin Beauregard, tainting him.

  Rob shut the door behind him as Arla leaned against a filing cabinet in her office. Rob pulled at the collar of his shirt, his fleshy, corpulent neck folds spilling over it. It wasn’t warm, but there was a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead.

  “Go on then, Rob, what were those idiots blabbering about?”

  “Well, I, the. . . .”

  “Something about me, right?”

  Rob cleared his throat. He looked down at the frayed carpet, then at the walls, and past Arla’s head. Anywhere but stare into the dagger-like intensity radiating from Arla’s eyes. She flapped her hands. “For heaven’s sake, Rob. Stop acting like a school kid. Just tell me what they were saying.”

  “It’s about what happens when you go on maternity leave.”

  Arla frowned. “Do you mean the post of DCI?” She knew about this already, of course. Johnson and Deakins, the other deputy assistant commissioner, were looking for her replacement. As far as she knew, they hadn’t decided as yet. Breath caught in her chest as a sudden thought bloomed in her mind.

  “Yes, your post.”

  “What about it?”

  Rob swallowed hard and tugged at his sweaty collar again. “Justin was bragging, guv. He said things will change around here when he becomes the top dog.”

  Arla walked to her desk, then lowered herself into the armchair. She tried not to show the shock she felt, her lungs suddenly empty of air. Of all the people who could take her post, why Justin? They could easily have chosen Harry. In fact, she had discreetly suggested Harry’s name to Johnson as well. Clearly, it hadn’t worked.

  “Top dog,” she whispered to herself, then pressed lightly on her eyelids with the tips of her fingers. “So, he’s going to become DCI when I leave for maternity?”

  Rob shifted on his feet, discomfort written plain on his face. “You didn’t know about this, guv?”

  Arla slapped the palm of her hand down on the desk, making Rob jump. “No,” she seethed, “I didn’t.” Johnson had promised she would have some say in choosing her successor. She would be gone for six months at least, maybe longer. Now, she feared Justin would resent her even more when she returned from maternity leave. The power would go to his head. Given what she knew of him already, it was a dangerous cocktail.

  She rose and walked past Rob, into the open-plan office. Harry was seated at Lisa’s desk and he straightened when he saw her.

  “I’m going to see Johnson. Stay here.” She knew Harry would be asking Rob about what had happened. Obviously, Harry hadn’t been informed either. She took the elevator up to the fourth floor, and then knocked on the door of Johnson’s office. A gruff voice ordered her inside.

  Johnson looked up from the file he was reading, his eyebrows rising when he saw Arla. He stood, coming around the desk, something he never did for any of the detectives.

  “Why didn’t you just ring?”

  Arla suppressed the rising tide of anger and spoke between clenched teeth. “I had to discuss this with you face-to-face.”

  She sat down on a chair at his desk while Johnson took his seat. She had a brief view of his initials, WJ, monogrammed into the gilded black leather before he settled his ample form into it. She didn’t waste any time.

  “Why did you give Justin my job?”

  Johnson’s mouth fell open as the delicate skin around his eyes relaxed. His pupils dilated, before constricting like his eyebrows. “Who told you?”

  Arla clenched, then unclenched her fists. “The fact that he can’t keep his mouth shut should make you worry about your choice of my successor. Sir.”

  Johnson’s nostrils flared. His upper lip rose in a snarl as he shifted back into his chair. He muttered something under his breath.

  “I don’t think Justin can be trusted. He’s a good cop, we both know that. He’s done his hard yards. But you know the rumours about him,” Arla continued.

  Johnson looked genuinely surprised. “What rumours?”

  Arla threw her head back and stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. Johnson was such a pen-pusher he had no idea of what happened at street level anymore. Strange to think, she thought, this man had been her first instructor when she took the detective grade examinations. Sparkles of crimson fire burned in her eyes as she stared at him.

  “You mean you really don’t know?”

  Johnson frowned and shook his head. Arla said, “The case against the Albanian cocaine gang members. One of them said a policeman planted the weapon in his house. Justin was the only one who had been to that house. And he went on his own, so there were no witnesses.”

  Johnson spread his hands. “You’re taking the word of a gang member?”

  “He was a sixteen-year-old boy, sir. He was scared stiff and wanted a way out. I offered him a deal. He told me the truth to get off a lengthy jail sentence.” She straightened her spine and lifted her chin. “And that’s not the only case.” She rattled off two more instances where Justin’s shady activities had come under scrutiny. She shook her head. “At first I thought it was hearsay. Like you said, we can’t trust a criminal. But even members of his team and some of the uniformed officers have seen him in odd places.”

  Johnson
eyed her with a flat, calm look in his slate grey eyes. “I know you don’t like him, Arla. But you must be careful about smearing the name of a colleague. We live in glass houses.”

  “He can chuck as many stones at me as he wants. I have nothing to fear.”

  “No?” Johnson’s forehead muscles arched upwards. “Punching a suspect, losing your temper, being rude to your seniors. . . . The list goes on, Arla.”

  She opened her mouth to speak but Johnson put a hand up. “You have no proof against Justin. Criminals will always try to incriminate police officers. You know how this works. As far as I’m concerned, Justin’s a bloody good copper and when you’re gone, he deserves your job.”

  Arla grimaced, then shuddered. “Of all the senior detectives, you had to choose him. Why?”

  Johnson shrugged. “The South London Command chose him. It wasn’t just me.”

  “I see.” She forced herself to hold her tongue. The South London Command was composed of Nick Deakins, one of the deputy assistant commissioners, and four other senior figures. Nick wasn’t exactly her biggest fan. Had they done this deliberately to irk her? She dismissed the thought as petty, but a bad taste lingered in her mouth.

  “What about Harry?”

  “DI Mehta is your partner, and the father of your child.” Johnson’s voice dropped as he blinked, then lowered his eyes. “You need him close to you and he needs some daddy time. He could well be a candidate for the top job in the future, but this isn’t a good time for him.”

  She stared at Johnson for a while, wondering if there was an angle here she couldn’t see. Maybe there was a connection between Deakins and Justin that she didn’t know of. She also knew it was futile to ask about it, or to try to change their minds.

  Johnson cleared his throat. “I heard you went to see Rebecca Stone. Thank you for that.”

  Arla picked the corner of a nail, gathering her thoughts. “No problem, sir.”