by L. J. Hutton
With Ray having a young family, he was going home to Wolverhampton whenever he got the chance, and so Bill found himself more often alone in the evenings. Of the two local DSs, Charlie Houseman was a pleasant enough man, though again very much a family man who went home whenever the job let up enough. And the dreadful Eddie Norrington was keeping his distance, which was something Bill could only be grateful for. Seemingly Eddie had picked up on the fact that Bill wouldn’t tolerate his more rabid opinions, and was steering clear. All of which meant that Bill spent some very long hours on his own, but without the luxury of being able to play the music he would have at home, or raiding his substantial bookshelves.
However that at least gave him time to read through the file on Carol’s case, although it was scant consolation to find that the detectives working that one had had no more success than he was having with Sanay’s. What he did pick up on, though, was that the finally-indentified Justin Pickersleigh had also had a new romantic attachment within a month of his death. Yet if Bill had been hoping for a crossover in the descriptions of the woman, he was to be disappointed. This time the woman was described as tall, slim and very blonde.
“Natural almost white blonde,” Bill read out as he leaned back in the one chair in his room. Then looked at the report again, perplexed. “‘No DNA could be extracted from the single long white hair found on the body. It is questionable as the whether it is even human.’ What the hell does that mean?” He flipped back and forth through the report, wondering whether the unfortunate Mr Pickersleigh had been a keen horse rider, for instance, because the length given of the hair was too long for anything like a cat or dog, even of the shaggy variety. But then surely the lab would have picked up that it was animal hair much faster than this?
The other thing he noticed was that there was a month in between the two cases, and when he came to check in his diary, he realised that coincidentally both victims had died on the night of the new moon. Now is that because whoever did this knew that the night would be pitch-black then? he wondered. After all, the one night when you could guarantee that the sky would be dark, even on a perfectly cloudless one, would be on the night of the new moon. But then that would have necessitated using torches, or at least leaving car headlights on, for whoever did this to be able to see what they were doing, and rather more crucially given how Sanay had died, for him to be able to see whatever it was that had frightened him out of his wits.
Would you have risked some nosy farmer, or his kids on the way back from some Young Farmer’s ‘do’, spotting lights where there shouldn’t be any? he mused. Let’s face it, most people out this way must be clued up about rural crime. You’d think that their first thought would be that it was some toe-rag after the John Deere combine-harvester or the Massey Ferguson tractor. And with the price those things go for, someone would be hot off the mark ringing us, even if they couldn’t care less about your romantic assignations. So why risk it?
The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced in his own mind that the full moon ought to have been the chosen time, considerably helped by his own experience of people behaving oddly at that time of the month. Full moons always seemed to bring out the odd characters. And so it niggled away at him that the new moon should have been the common factor, even if he could hardly go to one of his colleagues and say so – they might have looked at him very sideways if he had. What also kept mentally poking him was the worry that this was the start of a pattern. Come the next new moon, was there a danger of them finding another body out in an orchard?
However, by the time the next new moon came around, Bill had other things to deal with, not least being a double murder out in a trio of isolated houses. And so it was only when he noticed the following full moon coming around that he thought back to his worries, and mentally chastised himself for twitching at ghosts in the shadows which had proved to be nothing at all. Even so, by the second time he returned to his flat to get changes of clothes, he took the time to go into his own office and ring the detective who had caught for the other odd case.
After he’d explained the similarities, and therefore why he was calling, he asked, “So what was your victim like? Did you get much of sense of him as a person?”
“Funny you should ask that,” DI Chesterton said in a tone of voice that already had Bill sitting up and reaching for a pen before he even started. “Justin Pickersleigh started off looking like the kind of bloke who wouldn’t swat a fly. He’d been living long-term with his mum, you see, after his father left them. And to be honest, at that point I couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for him. It seems he’d been on the verge of moving out when his mum had a fall. Or at least that’s what we pieced together once we went through his online purchases, though where he took that stuff to we never did find out. Couldn’t find his name on any rented property, and he wasn’t earning enough to afford a mortgage.
“We thought that looking after his mum had become more than he could handle, because her carers said that he’d been having increasing times away from the flat. But then living in what had virtually become a hospital couldn’t have been much of a life for a bloke who hadn’t yet reached forty. Poor old girl broke her hip, you see, which is always a nasty one.”
“God, yes,” Bill sympathised. “How many times have we had to break into some old person’s house, because after breaking a hip they then got a blood clot which gave them a heart-attack or a stroke?”
Chesterton agreed. “Exactly what me and my sergeant were saying at the time. And in fairness, old Mrs Pickersleigh didn’t seem to be a bad old stick, not like some we’ve known. She seemed genuinely grateful for everything her son had done for her, and was incredibly cut up that now she’d have to go into a nursing home. Well actually, she was already there by the time we interviewed her, because there’d already been carers coming in to help with things like bathing her and putting her to bed. So they’d alerted Social Services way before we got there about her son’s absence. But you could see that she was pretty upset at the thought that she’d never be able to go home again, and she was beyond distraught that her son had died. I felt so sorry for her.”
There was a pregnant pause.
“Go on,” Bill encouraged.
“Well, that’s when my DS’s kind nature got the better of her. When we saw her at the inquest, she asked Mrs Pickersleigh if there was anything in particular that she really wanted brought to her from the flat. Cath’s a good sort, and she was offering to do this in her own time, so I wasn’t about to say she couldn’t. And to be fair, Mrs P. only wanted some framed photos, and a few other knick-knacks, so I thought no more of it
“That was until I got a call from Cath! She was in the Pickersleigh’s flat, you see, and although she’d found the photos okay, she’d had a harder time locating one of the ornaments Mrs P wanted. So not thinking anything of it, she’d started searching the flat – and she’d felt some urgency to do that because the council were coming in to clear it within days, everything having been wrapped up ...or so we thought! Except, she came up empty for this figurine in Mrs P’s bedroom and the lounge, and so she thought to go and have a look in Justin’s room, just to make sure, you know.
“Now we’d done what we thought was a thorough search back when we’d been looking for a motive and a suspect in his death. And so we’d taken his laptop away and found nothing remotely dodgy on it at all. To all intents and purposes, Justin Pickersleigh looked like the most boring bloke who’d ever drawn breath. No close mates, not known at any of the local pubs, no apparent hobbies. In fact it was puzzling us as to who he could have ever crossed to meet with any sort of violent end, regardless of his odd cause of death and location – I mean you don’t find your average thug working in a call centre, do you? Too boring by half for them.
“About the worst we could have said of him at that stage was that he seemed to have been a real mommy’s boy. He seemed such a nonentity, a proper little mouse of a man, even to the extent that we wondered whether th
is incredible woman he’d been talking to his mum about even existed. Because none of us could imagine someone like him with a woman like that.”
“Was she that high-class?”
“The description was more what you’d call ‘exotic’. Talking to Justin’s colleagues at the call centre where he worked, you just couldn’t imagine him meeting – let alone dating – a woman who he described to his mum as having ‘hair like moonbeams and eyes like starlight.’ I mean, that was just far too poetic for him.”
But for Bill the words hit like a hammer. What had Sanay said his woman had been like? He hurriedly flipped back through his own notes, yes, there it was, ‘hair like midnight and eyes like stars.’ That was far too similar for comfort!
“DI Scathlock?”
Bill realised he’d been silent. “Sorry. Your words just had me looking back at my own notes. I’ll tell you about them in a moment. So go on, what did your DS find, then?”
“Hmph, well having teenage sons, Cath’s a bit more tech’ savvy than me, so when she found a second charger lead, she remembered that it wasn’t the right sort for Justin’s laptop. And she knew that because he’d got the same model as her youngest, who’s forever losing his and calling for her to find it. Typical kid! But that meant that she wondered why Justin would have bothered to keep a charger for a laptop he no longer had? I know we all accumulate crap like that, but she said it stood out to her, because everything else in Justin’s room was almost obsessively tidy. Everything in its place and nothing without a purpose, if you know what I mean?
“We hadn’t picked up on that particularly in the first search, because we assumed that the lack of clutter was down to him having deciding to leave, and that he must have already had a good clear out in preparation for that. So we got no clue from anything still there. But Cath started to see it in a different light. And she started to look for hiding places – both for the ornament and for the laptop.
“There was nothing in the flat itself, but the residents had stores down on the ground floor where they could shove things like garden seats and rotary clothes driers, and it was down there that Cath found a box. It was just your average plastic storage box, but when she opened it up, beneath the cushions for garden chairs, she found a second laptop.”
“Bright lass, this Cath of yours.”
“Too damned right! Now obviously she wanted me to come down, not least because we also had to contact the Prosecution Service and explain why she’d gone in there without a warrant – although, of course, this was after we’d had the verdict of accidental death, and thought we’d put the case to bed as much as we could. Luckily, old Mrs Pickersleigh needed no prompting to tell them how grateful she’d been that Cath would go and fetch her photos, and since they were propped up on every available surface in her half of a shared room by then, that was believed. But now we had the issue of the laptop, and to be frank, I think if Justin had been alive, we might have been on shakier ground.”
“Yes, I can see that,” Bill sympathised. “You couldn’t have built a prosecution on a dodgy search like that, even if it had never been originally intended as such. Do I assume, though, that given your lack of other evidence over the death, you were allowed to send the laptop to the tech’s?”
“We were, and bloody hell, when they opened that one up, a whole different side of Justin came to light!”
“Really?”
“Oh yes! Turns out Mr Justin Pickersleigh was into kiddie porn’ in a big way!”
“Oh crap,” and Bill’s disgust wasn’t just his natural revulsion for paedophiles. This also took the case away from his, because whatever Sanay’s considerable faults might have been, at least he liked his compliant women to be adults. Maybe very young mentally, but very definitely fully adult physically.
“I know,” Chesterton sighed. “If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never understand the attraction that holds for some. But you can understand that this suddenly gave us a whole raft of suspects we’d not even known existed before, not least the probability of some very angry parents of the kids they’d photographed.”
“So was Justin a part of a ring?”
“Yes, in a minor way. Most of the images and videos were ones he’d purchased for just his own use. But there were a couple of photos and videos of two young girls that we thought he might have done himself, not least because the quality was way off and looked really homemade. That’s all over with the specialist unit now, you understand, so I don’t know what more has come of it – after all, we hardly have an investigation outstanding on it. All I can tell you is that the shots were taken out in the countryside somewhere. You could see dark trees and possibly hills, but not enough to identify exactly where he was at the time. But it’s certainly revised our opinion of our so-called victim.”
“I can see that it would,” Bill sympathised, then told Chesterton about the strange description that Sanay had given his brothers. “But now you’ve said about Pickersleigh being into kids, I don’t know that there’s quite such a coincidence with the cases.”
“I see your point,” Chesterton agreed. “Justin was very much into little girls from between about nine or ten up to about twelve or thirteen, depending on when they started to stop looking quite so childlike. Which is disgusting, but doesn’t really match up with your scumbag trading grown women, beyond them all being vulnerable victims.”
At that point Bill thanked Chesterton for his time, promised to let him know if he found anything in the way of a more positive connection between the two, and rang off. Once back in Shropshire, however, it did occur to him that rather than being the start of something, this might be the tail end of it, and so one evening when he couldn’t face going back to the B&B just yet, he started to trawl through his temporary division’s old files. He wasn’t hopeful, but at least it was something to keep him occupied for a few hours, and he wasn’t needing to do it in any rush.
Looking for unexplained deaths didn’t yield any results, but then out in a county where so much of it was farms, fields and open land, more often he found himself staring at index references to accidental deaths. He did work his way through those, though, because if another victim had had a long history of heart problems, or had previously had the kind of health problems where finding him or her collapsed in a field wouldn’t raise any questions, then they might easily have been classed as accidental. One did catch his eye, and he pulled up the file, then tagged it for him to read more thoroughly. It was the case of a farmer in his mid sixties who had been found collapsed in his orchard, and as much as anything it was that orchard connection which had Bill’s gut telling him it was relevant. Otherwise it just looked as though a seriously overweight man, with high-blood pressure and diabetes, had finally met the end his doctors had been warning him about for years. And because of that, nobody had been in the least bit surprised at his demise.
At least with everything having long been computerised, and Bill feeling that he didn’t need to go as far back as the old paper records, he could filter his searches. So the next time, he looked for anything connected to orchards. As expected, he found the elderly farmer again, plus one or two serious accidents, one of which had resulted in a prosecution for negligence because of poorly maintained equipment. But he wasn’t expecting to find a murder, and it wasn’t exactly the normal kind of thing either. The victim had been killed with by a sword thrust through his middle, and Bill also noted that Carol and Sylvia had been called upon to give their opinions on this one, Sylvia because of her considerable experience of dealing with remains from the eras when swords were the weapon of choice.
Yet once again the case was still open, because despite the best efforts of the Shropshire police, they had been able to find virtually nothing. Forensics hadn’t turned up so much as a discarded cigarette butt, nor any footmarks or anything which would give the faintest hint as to who was responsible. All Sylvia and Carol had been able to say was that the person who did this had had considerable strength, Sylvia giving a gra
phic demonstration at the inquest with a side of pork and a re-enactor’s sharpened sword, which had shown how hard it was to not only thrust the sword in in the first place, but to then pull it back out again. And that was relevant because the sword had been taken away and never found. She herself had needed help to pull the demonstration sword back out, thereby reinforcing their point that while they couldn’t say that it hadn’t been a woman, if it had, then she would have to have an athlete’s muscles and had probably been a physically large woman too. Sylvia herself was of middle height, and she made the point that even though the victim had been most likely on the ground at the time, the angle of the thrust suggested someone closer to six feet in height.
However, six feet Amazons possessing swords had proven impossible to find in Shropshire, and even though there had been a call out to neighbouring divisions and forces, everyone had come up empty-handed. Yet that known cause of death was probably why Carol hadn’t made the connection and told him herself. In her mind he was murdered, full stop, not an unexplained death.
What really had Bill sitting up and taking notes, though, was what had come out of the interviews with Damien Farrah’s family. Once again they were saying that he had become absolutely obsessed with a woman in the weeks leading up to his death. This time his father had been delighted at the time that he appeared to be serious about a girlfriend for once, saying that he’d worried that his son would never settled down. And this time there was a name, though despite all the efforts to track this woman down, nobody by the name of Pelydryn – either as a first name or a family name – had been found, making the investigating officers wonder whether this had been some kind of nickname, especially after a Welsh-speaker amongst them had pointed out that it could mean ‘sunbeam’, or possibly ‘moonbeam’.