by Conrad Jones
‘Disturbed by an animal, fox or a badger, maybe?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ll let you decide.’
They reached the rear of the building and Kim could smell everything Bob had described. Cannabis and decomposition. As they turned the corner, she saw three CSIs working on recovering the body. The stench was overpowering.
‘He’s been there a while,’ Kim said.
‘Probably since he disappeared,’ Bob agreed.
‘Has anyone told the family?’
‘Not yet. I thought it would be better to have him removed before we say anything.’
‘Good call.’
They watched the CSIs bagging evidence and placing it into plastic boxes. She knew one of them as Victor; he stopped working and approached them.
‘Hello, sergeant,’ he said.
‘Is it definitely him?’
‘We think so. The ID in his wallet belongs to Paul Critchley. There’s a driving license and a debit card,’ Victor said. ‘And there’s a silver St Christopher around his neck. It was on the list of personal items his family gave to the police at the time of his disappearance. There’re tattoos on the arms and legs but the decomp is too far gone to distinguish if they’re definitely Critchley’s. The fact they’re there at all, with the ID and the chain tells me it’s him.’
‘What state is the body in?’
‘He was busted up. His legs and jaw are broken and there’s a couple of fingers and toes missing but I can’t tell if they were stolen by creatures until we get him back to the lab.’
‘And what’s in the secondary site?’ Kim asked.
‘Three bin bags with various items of clothing, two jackets, a baseball cap, two T-shirts, a denim shirt, and a jumper. There’s also half a dozen cigarette butts, which we should be able to take DNA from.’ He picked up an evidence bag. ‘This is the motherload. Two wallets. One belonging to Mike Jarvis and the other Patrick McGowan. I’m making an educated guess that the DNA on the clothing will belong to your murdered UCs.’
‘All this evidence drops into our lap from an anonymous phone call?’ Kim said, shaking her head. ‘I think someone pointed us in the right direction, when it’s clearly the wrong direction.’
‘It did cross my mind,’ Bob said. ‘I’m never this lucky. Do you want to look inside?’
‘Yes. That’s good enough for me for now. Let’s take a look.’
They walked the perimeter of the building until they reached a narrow door. It was wedged open and the smell of skunk was heavy on the air. Inside was a cannabis farm on an industrial scale. Rows of plants were bathed in LED lights, irrigation tubes ran from the ceiling, providing water. Extractor fans were humming, maintaining a stable temperature. There were thousands of plants standing six-feet tall and a nursery for germinating young plants.
‘Now that’s what you call a cannabis farm,’ Kim said. She looked from one end of the building to the other, trying to count the number of plants. It was in the thousands. ‘This is a multimillion-pound operation. Anyone threatening this is going to wind up dead.’
‘Like Jarvis and McGowan. Absolutely. Do you know who owns it, yet?’ Bob asked.
‘Not yet. There’s an umbrella company but we’re digging deeper.’
‘Whoever it is, is going to be proper pissed off that they’ve lost this.’
‘And some,’ Kim added.
CHAPTER 62
Simon and Kerry were conducting the search of Glen Price’s home. The front door was breached, and armed response swept the building before the search could begin properly. It appeared the occupants had left in a hurry. Cupboard doors had been left open and there were clothes dotted about on the floor. There were pictures of Glen abroad, posing alone but none of him and his wife. Patricia Price had been erased from the house. It appeared that Glen Price had buried his wife and then carried on as if nothing had changed. He’d masked her departure well—apart from not submitting her tax returns. That was an oversight.
‘So, Patricia had no family in the area?’ Simon asked.
‘Her brother lives in Australia, but her phone records show no contact between them. No one noticed she was dead. Price knew that no one would miss her. No wonder he bottled it when we turned up, asking questions. His cosy little life would be put under the spotlight and his wife’s absence would have been exposed. He panicked.’
‘Where do you think the money we found came from?’
‘At Porth Dafarch?’
‘Yes.’
‘They made a lot of money selling drugs at the factory until Kio was jailed, the other three were implicated and questioned so one of them hid their stash of money and Adams returned to it every month and took enough to keep them happy without having to explain any large amounts going into their bank accounts. Everything was rosy until Kio came out of jail and demanded his share of the profits. They say no, so he follows Adams, kills him, and spoils everything.’
‘What about Patricia Price?’
‘Who knows? She wound up dead during a domestic, Glen panics and asks for help. They hid her near the money because they knew it was safe there. Safer than putting her body in the sea. They always come up eventually.’
‘It’s all speculation, I suppose. The poor woman. Imagine being married to a bastard like that and ending up in a hole in the ground and no one even knows you’ve gone,’ Kerry said. ‘It’s so sad.’
She walked into the bedroom where Price slept. The quilt was pulled back and unmade. One of the wardrobe doors was open and half the contents were missing. The remaining garments were women’s clothes, belonging to someone under thirty-ish, at a guess. She picked through them. They were winter clothes.
‘She took all her summer stuff,’ Kerry said. ‘They’ve gone somewhere hot.’
An open door led to an en suite. Kerry searched the bathroom and checked the medicine cabinet. She found three bottles of lithium with Patricia’s name on them.
‘She was bipolar,’ Kerry said. ‘The last date on the prescription was three years ago.’ She closed the cabinet and opened the washing basket. There was a pair of jeans, which were muddy around the legs. She pulled them out. ‘Look at these jeans. They’re very muddy.’
‘Bag them.’
Kerry put them into an evidence bag and peered into the basket. Underneath the jeans, she found a mustard coloured sweatshirt. ‘Look at this,’ she said, removing it from the basket. ‘This looks like blood on the sleeves and the cuffs and there’s splatter on the chest here.’
‘Messy,’ Simon said. ‘What you’d expect from a hammer attack don’t you think?’ He shrugged. ‘I had Kio down as the killer but I might be wrong.’
‘It looks like it. The blood on this takes some explanation.’
‘So does his vanishing trick.’
‘Definitely. We thought the killer was taking Adams to the cliffs to throw him off but maybe Price wasn’t taking him to the sea. Maybe he was taking him up onto the range because Adams was the only one of them who knew where the money was hidden.’
‘That makes sense. So, where is Price now?’
‘I’d be on a beach counting my money. We need to check the airports.’
CHAPTER 63
Alan called a briefing to bring the team up to speed. Events were happening fast and everyone needed to know where they were. The press had descended on the island talking to anyone who would speak to them. There were plenty of takers, most of them talking crap and speculating or repeating gossip they’d overheard in a pub. The discovery of Patricia Price and an undisclosed stash of money at Porth Dafarch had fuelled speculation of a connection to organised crime and the murder of two undercover officers. The press was linking the deaths and without the facts, who wouldn’t? On the face of it, Alan would have done the same. Not that it mattered. Even with the facts, the press would make what they wanted to of the story. One of the redtops had run with the headline, ‘Unholy Island’. Alan couldn’t argue with that.
‘Okay everyone,’ Alan said. The g
athering settled down to listen. ‘Glen Price’s Porsche has been found at Manchester airport. He took a flight to Bangkok with a thirty-year-old woman called Stephanie Mortimer.’ The image of Stephanie appeared on the screen. She was an attractive brunette with mischief in her eyes. ‘She’s a widow. It appears they’ve been an item since about the time Patricia disappeared. I want one of you to look into how her husband died, please. We’re trying to track them down but it’s unlikely we’ll be able to extradite.’ He turned from the screen. ‘Anything from the lab, Kim?’
‘The blood on the sweatshirt taken from Price’s house is a match for Adams’ blood type, but it’s too soon for DNA results to confirm it’s his, yet. The mud on the jeans has an unusually high salt content, consistent with being from the Porth Dafarch area. Pamela said she’ll be able to say if it’s definitely from there when she’s run some comparisons.’
‘Glen Price was at the murder scene and he’s covered in the victim’s blood,’ Alan said. ‘Okay. So, we’re working on the assumption Kio, Trent, Adams, and Price were working together selling cocaine at the car factory, until Kio was arrested. The others were interviewed and clearly spooked. They hid their money and then when things settled down and Kio was sent down, they filtered it out bit by bit over the years but only Kelvin Adams knew where it is. At some point, Price kills his wife and asks Adams to help him dispose of her, which he does because he knows a remote place where he’s hidden stuff before. So, she ends up next to the money. Kio comes out of prison, making threats to kill Price if he doesn’t give him money. He bottles it and contacts Trent and Adams and tells them Kio is demanding money from them. They say no but Price wants to pay him off, so he follows Kelvin Adams to Porth Dafarch. He waits until Adams has recovered some of the money, hijacks him in the toilets when he’s getting changed, and tries to force him back onto the range to show him where the money is stashed. Adams puts up a fight and Price kills him. He takes the money he’d recovered and buggers off to the Far East. Adams is dead. Derek Kio is dead. That leaves Barry Trent.’ He clicked the remote. The images of Barry Trent and his wife appeared. ‘The Trents are missing but their car is at their home. There are signs of a break in and signs of a struggle inside.’ He replaced their image with an image of Derek Kio, dead on the street. ‘Kio was assassinated in broad daylight.’ He tapped the screen. ‘If Glen Price is our mastermind in this case, we have to assume that an engineer from a Jaguar factory is capable of kidnapping the Trents and shooting Derek Kio outside a pub in the middle of the afternoon before fleeing the country.’ He looked around the room. ‘Simon, Kerry, you interviewed him several times, was Price capable of this?’
‘Not a chance,’ Simon said.
‘Was he capable of hitting Adams over the head, possibly. The evidence says he did. If he was being threatened by Kio, it would have made him act irrationally. He may have panicked and asked Adams for the money to pay off Kio, but Adams said no so, he decided to take it for himself. I can see that happening but was he capable of kidnap and assassination in daylight, in a public place, not a chance.’
‘I agree,’ Alan said. ‘The question we need to answer now is if Price isn’t behind this, who is?’ No one offered the answer. ‘Who is at the top of the tree? Simon, Kerry, you stay on this please. Speak to the Merseyside Drug Squad and the Matrix unit. Ask them if they have any historical information on who they were likely to be buying their cocaine from. I would focus on Derek Kio. If he was putting the pressure on Price, someone may have been putting the pressure on him. Someone will have an idea who they were buying from so let’s find out.’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Sorry to interrupt, guv,’ Kim said. ‘We’ve got a name for the owners of the land in Llaingoch.’
‘Surprise me?’
‘Sundown Property Management, owned and operated by, Will Pinter.’
‘Will Pinter is bedbound with dementia. The farm has been in the family since it was built. I think we might be missing a trick here. Let’s piece all this together,’ Alan said. ‘The dealers we’ve questioned so far are all pointing their fingers at Lloyd Jones.’
‘Conveniently, he’s done one,’ Kim said.
‘Exactly. Some of the dealers we interviewed have gone a step further and told us the good cannabis sold locally is coming from a character known as Worzel Gummidge. What do we know about him or her?’
‘We’ve got a profile on Facebook but not much else.’
‘I’ve been told in confidence that the best quality cannabis with a regular supply comes from a guy called Lee Punk,’ Alan said. A murmur passed through the gathering. ‘You’re familiar with him as he was questioned this morning. We need to watch Lee and sooner or later, he’ll lead us to his supplier. I’m guessing it’s this character Worzel.’
‘What about the farm Will Pinter owned, guv?’ Kerry said. ‘We’re dismissing Pinter as a cover for fraud yet everything we look at leads us to this company, Sundown Property.’
‘Okay. What are you thinking?’ Alan said.
‘He did trade under this name, didn’t he?’
‘Yes. For twenty-years.’
‘Isn’t feasible someone involved with his farm is still running the company in his name. They could be running the money laundering at the Caernarvon Castle, the laundry, and the cannabis farm as a single business.’
‘Yes, it’s feasible.’
‘Anyone growing cannabis on that scale needs to be able to hide the money, so they set up the perfect operation to do that, but we stumbled across it by chance, investigating another case.’
‘When I went to see Will Pinter, his nephew answered the door. His name is Gar, which I assume is short for Gareth. The farm looked like a lot of money has been spent on it. I thought the farm was doing well but it could be dirty money,’ Alan said. ‘Get a warrant for the farm, the house, the buildings, everything. Bring him in and let’s see what he’s got to say.’
‘What about Operation Thor, guv?’ Kim asked.
‘What about them?’
‘Paul Critchley,’ she said. ‘Jamie Hollins threatened to kill him and throw him off the mountain the day before he disappeared.’
‘In an ideal world, we should arrest him and check we’re not treading on their toes,’ Alan said. ‘But we’re not so, we won’t. Get in touch with DCI Kensington and tell him that if they don’t move on Hollins today, we will. He’s in a position to vanish. We need to interview him about Critchley but ultimately, he’s their catch.’
‘I’ll speak to him, guv.’
He changed the image to the toilet block at Abergele. The room fell deathly silent.
‘Phillip Trotter was murdered here in the early hours of this morning. He was a thirty-three-year-old father of three. You all know the history of this place. Peter Moore killed his last victim, Tony Davies, here in December ninety-five. The murder is identical, except our copycat upped the ante and removed the victim’s head.’ The gathering listened intently. ‘This is our man again, no doubt about it. He’s exhausted the Moore killings, so now he’s going to have to develop his own MO. Alice, I want your team to concentrate on this now.’
‘Guv. Where do you want us to start?’
‘We have one sighting of him shortly before Brian Hindley was murdered. The man at Penrhos wearing a black uniform. We know he’s not one of ours and we know he’s not an employee of Kingdom Security.’
‘Could be a transport copper off the railway?’
‘Maybe. It could be a customs officer from the port. Look into both.’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Watch this footage,’ Alan said. The screen showed a clip from Sky News. The camera panned from the cob, across the sea to Church Bay, zoomed in on the Skerries lighthouse, before focusing on the car park at Penrhos nature reserve. The Hindley family were gathered there. ‘There were a lot of cameras on the cob while we were looking for Brian Hindley and there were cameras on the mountain when we found Zak Edwards. Our killer is a showman. He craves attention a
nd wants to create the news. My hunch is he wants to be there too. I think our killer will be on some of these images and I want your team to gather as many images of this case as you can. Use Instagram, use Facebook, use the online news reports and look for a man in a dark uniform. I think he’s there for us to find because he can’t help himself.’
‘Okay, guv.’
‘You all know what needs to be done. We’ll meet here tomorrow morning at nine-thirty. Any developments, keep me in the loop.’
CHAPTER 64
The BBC was running an extended report on breakfast news. They were using clips from the Peter Moore documentary, the Man in Black. There was his father, smiling and laughing for the camera as if he was being filmed for a comedy. He was fascinated by the article and had to sit down to watch it. There were things to do but they could wait for a few minutes. The reporters who worked on the article had been to the island. One of them was filmed at Penrhos, the sea emerald green behind him. They explored the life of Brian Hindley and Zak Edwards and debated how the killer picked his victims and why. The pattern of knife wounds was discussed and one of their criminology experts said the killer was a psychopath obsessed with Peter Moore. No shit, Sherlock. He wondered how long the man had studied for his degree to come up with absolute nuggets of deduction like that. It was almost genius to work that out. He thought about cutting out his tongue and then asking him how psychotic he thought that was on a scale of one to ten. If that was the best he could come up with, he really needed to change career. The piece touched on the latest murder but they had no details. Footage of Pensarn Beach from the eighties had been tagged into the article in an effort to be the first channel to cover it in any detail. It was magnificent. They had weaved images of his victims into a story alongside images of his father’s crimes. Father and son engrained in serial killer history forever. It was a milestone. There would be more. They would be talked about in the same breath forever.