by L. J. Hutton
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Carol agreed. “If this had been in Birmingham, for the same distances, Mulligrew might have been in one of the rougher parts of Ladywood; while Farrah could have been in a big house in Edgbaston; and Pickersleigh could have been in Handsworth, or even Smethwick and therefore over the council boundary into another administrative area. In a city with more than a million people, you wouldn’t even think twice about the grouping, would you?”
“No, it’s only because it’s out here in the countryside, where people are far more spread out that it caught my eye. And even now, these men are only seen as connected by you and me. A control-freak of a father, a wife-beater, a trio of street-gang members who’ve met violent deaths, and a paedophile who died of a heart-attack, hardly leap off the pages of a report as being connected, do they?”
“Especially as the man you tell me is Gaylord Harbottle, a.k.a. Tufty, was pretty certainly killed by Bose, because then he’s totally separate to Farrah. The knife was still on the ground beside him, you know. It had fallen out as he’d begun to decompose. So I think he may have tried to pull it out before he died, or possibly rolled on it in his agony – which might be why Bose didn’t take it away with him – but loosening it in the wound. But we’re pretty certain we can pull fingerprints off it. Jeff’s got one of his lads doing that first thing, because if we can pin his death onto Bose for certain, then everyone at that quarry looks like being Bose’s victims in one way or another.”
Bill thought for a moment. “Do you think you’ll be able to get enough off the ones at the back of the quarry to nail someone for their murders? Only I’m not convinced that Bose did for all of them. He seems to be a spur of the moment killer. Totally unpredictable and savage. Whereas the ones you’ve yet to get to look as though they were killed elsewhere and dumped there – and that kind of forward planning wasn’t Bose’s forte.”
“Interesting,” Carol mused. “In which case, we’ll be extra observant when we get to them. I have no problem with Bose being the evil bastard who did for everyone, but I don’t want someone else to walk free because we presumed too much.”
“Well if I had to make a guess,” Bill ventured, “I’d be thinking in terms of that Estonian bloke who’s shacked up with Bose and Costa’s aunt. Everything the Walsall lads have said about him suggests that he’s the brains behind most of this. He’s the one who’s come in and started taking over the prostitution rings, and therefore he’s the one with the most motive for getting rid of ‘unwanted’ girls – i.e. those who were giving him trouble.”
“I’ll definitely keep an eye out for that,” Carol said warmly. “God knows whether we’ll get any useful DNA off the girls after all this time out in the open and in their advanced stages of decomposition, but I’ll give it my best shot. And speaking of shots, if I can get some bullets out of those victims, we should have no trouble working out if one or more guns were used. Toxicology might be a bit hit and miss given the age of some of those bodies, so we won’t be able to tell if any died by drug overdoses, but the ones who died by violent means should be possible to sort out.”
“There’s just one other thing,” Bill said hurriedly, having seen Harbir pass the window on his way back in from his long chat on the phone. “Be prepared for a call about another body at Hawthorn Hall Hotel!”
Carol looked at him, horrified. “Another man?”
“No, a woman,” Bill corrected her. “If I’m right, she’s Farrah’s murder victim, and I’m really hoping you’ll be able to prove it was him and wipe the smirk off his dreadful family’s faces once and for all.”
Chapter 18
HARBIR CAME DOWN TO breakfast the next morning looking like he hadn’t slept a wink.
“Are you okay?” Bill asked the young DC solicitously.
Harbir shook his head. “You’d think after years on the beat in an inner city area I’d be immune to pretty much anything, but the moment I lay down and tried to close my eyes, all I could see was those poor girls.”
“Mate, if that wasn’t bothering the hell out of you, I’d be worried,” Bill replied, with a consoling hand on Harbir’s shoulder. “The day you can look at something like we found yesterday and not be seriously bothered by it is the time you should give up the job.”
Harbir gave him a wan smile back, but said, “Setty never seems to be bothered by things,” only to have Carol respond waspishly from behind him with,
“Well he didn’t hang around long enough to see the worst of it, did he?”
As Bill held the door into the breakfast room open for them, she continued,
“He didn’t even go and take a proper look around the bit of the quarry nearest the front! We hadn’t had chance to get the access properly established before he’d buggered off, so it’s no wonder he’s not shaken by crime scenes if he’s always as fast to walk away from them.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Bill responded, grateful that Carol had said what he couldn’t, since it wouldn’t have been right for him to disparage Harbir’s DI in front of him.
Breakfast was served in what passed for the pub’s dining room, but because of that, the over-bar TV was on showing the morning news, and it was as Bill, Carol and Harbir were helping themselves to orange juice from the buffet that the subtitle flashed across the screen, ‘mass murder site found in Wales.’
“What the f...!” Bill growled, stopping to stare in horror at the screen.
Sure enough, although the sound was turned down, the subtitles continued as the screen changed to a police press conference, and who should be there sitting beside his Superintendant but Likesh Setty. Absolutely furious, Bill could barely stand to read the transcript, such as it was, of what was being said, but it amounted to the West Midlands force claiming to have found the dumping site of several sex workers from the Midlands at an undisclosed site in Wales, and that several arrests had been made overnight.
“Arrests!” Bill spluttered. “How can there have been arrests? There isn’t a scrap of evidence as yet!”
Then he turned to look at Carol, and realised he’d never seen her quite this angry. “So that’s what the bloody phone-call at six this morning was about!” she snapped.
Harbir was looking every bit as shocked as them, so Bill knew he wasn’t behind this, and then Carol continued fuming,
“Bloody Setty called me up, asking me if I’d got a cause of death yet! I told him in no uncertain terms that we haven’t even got all of the bodies yet, and it might be days before I get around to finishing them all. He was really bloody rude, so I told him I’d be reporting him if he didn’t get off the phone right now. But seeing them up there now, I reckon his super’ has jumped the gun and made arrests on the presumption of what I’ll find.”
“That’s damned dangerous,” Bill groaned. “Could compromise things if they’ve grabbed the Estonian and haven’t a shred of anything concrete as yet. If he starts screaming police harassment, it’ll make it doubly hard to go after him if something does point directly at him. Bugger it! We’re going to have to be even more careful than normal to establish chains of evidence now.”
He heard a grunt from beside him and saw that Harbir was looking miserable. “Won’t be you they go after if it all falls apart, though,” he said wretchedly. “I’m the member of the West Mids here on the ground.”
“Oh sod that!” Bill said immediately. “No! I’m not having you carrying the can for your superiors. Can you two grab me a cooked breakfast, please? I’m going outside to make a phone-call.”
The moment he was beyond being heard, Bill was dialling through to Suzanne, and when he got to her, was bitingly clear what he thought of the situation. When she could get a word in, Suzanne was all sympathy.
“Bill, our Assistant Chief has already blown his top over this. For once Williams did the right thing, and when I told him about what’s happened, he reported it higher up the chain. Granted, at that stage he was just arse-covering, so that it was clear that we – or rather
you – had helped out only at West Mids’ request, and that really it’s down to the Powys lads to deal with the crime scene since it’s on their patch. They’ve got Carol helping more out of courtesy, and because of her experience, not because we were claiming the case for ours. If anyone has a claim, it’s Shropshire’s division, because it ties in with the case you caught while covering over there, and him being part of the wider gang. Had DI Villavarayan not been so alert as to make the connection to the Walsall crew, nobody would have been any the wiser, and since he was officially seconded there and detached from his old force, it’s a bloody cheek for his former DI to start staking a claim.”
“Hmph! And while we’re talking of Carol...” and Bill told her of the harassing phone-call Carol had had early that morning.
“Oh, I’ll be passing that straight upstairs!” Suzanne said disgustedly. “We value Carol far too much to have her being treated like that!”
“Well I was going to just make sure that they were okay today and then leave them to it. But now I think I’ll stick around. I want to have a word with the Welsh DI, Dafydd Parry, for a start off. Make it clear to him that we’re not part of what could turn into an escalating problem. I’ve got a good working relationship going with his DS already, because she came out to the other lot I found, so that’s another reason to keep things between us amicable.”
“Excellent, though I never thought I’d hear of you being the diplomat, Bill,” she said with amusement.
“First time for everything,” he chuckled.
“Right I’m off to storm the barricades of the gov’s office and set him straight on all of this. Wish me luck!”
Thinking that he wouldn’t want to be the person who stood in Suzanne’s way this time, Bill returned to the dining room to find Carol guarding a plate with a generous full English on it.
“All yours,” Carol declared, “though how you can eat all of that at this hour I do not know.”
Bill looked across at Harbir, and the way he was chewing slowly on a piece of toast. “No cooked brekkie for you this morning?”
Harbir looked up balefully. “I could eat it, but I’m more worried about losing it when we get back up to the quarry. Seems a shame to waste good food like that.”
“Very sensible,” Bill assured him. “You’ll notice that Carol’s avoided choosing the bloody-looking bits like baked beans and tomatoes for me, and doubled up on the scrambled egg, mushrooms and potato waffles – I know those will stay put.” Harbir looked rather more relieved knowing that an experienced DI like Bill wasn’t immune to having his stomach turned, and that had Bill wondering whether they could work a transfer for Harbir out to West Mercia, even if it was only for six months or so. It would do him good to work with someone more encouraging than Setty.
Up at the quarry they spent another grim day, but the discovery by one of Jeff’s team of the magazine clip from a gun ensured that the day after, the Welsh team would be back doing a close search of the area looking for the gun it had come from. By now Carol was able to say that although she couldn’t prove it yet, it looked highly likely that all the shooting at this site had been done with one gun, going by the spent rounds they had found scattered about the place. She’d also been able to confirm that Tufty’s killing wound matched the knife they found, but also in private to Bill that it was nothing like the wound on Damien Farrah.
“That’s a relief,” Bill admitted, as he sat with her drinking the coffee he’d done a run for down to the nearest pub at lunchtime and brought back up for the team, along with a pile of sandwiches. “I can’t tell you why I believed that warrior bloke, but it’s good to have the reassurance that he didn’t kill Tufty.”
“I feel quite sorry of him – Tufty, I mean,” Carol said quietly, so that the other team members also taking their break couldn’t overhear. “If what you got told is right, he’d had enough and was trying to do the right thing. From what Harbir told me, he sounds more like the typical poor kid who just got swept up in the gang culture. Under other circumstances, he’d probably have never been a threat to anyone beyond the odd drunken scuffle in a pub. With a mother like that, though, he didn’t stand a chance, did he? Whereas you have to think that there was something very sick about Bose. He’s not a serial killer in the sense of someone who goes out and hunts down their victims, but he seems to have had no conscience about what he did. The sighting of him in the Merry Hill Shopping Centre that Harbir told us about on the way over here, which has to be only days after he killed Tufty, and him laughing and joking with two women, says it all.”
“Do you think you’ll have enough to get any ID on the girls?” Bill wondered. “You know I don’t mean names or anything. I know enough to realise that won’t happen. But it might be good if we can establish ethnicity. If nothing else, that might help to match them up with any reports of illegals, or missing persons.”
Carol shrugged. “I may never get beyond a broad hint of somewhere in Africa for the darker girls, and maybe a former Eastern Bloc region for the others. If I’m really lucky, and I can narrow down some of the isotopes in things like their teeth, we might get a more specific region, but since they all seem to have been too poor to have had dental work done, anything closer than that would be nothing short of a miracle.”
“Well I’ll pray for miracles, then, because I can’t help but think that somewhere out there, there are parents who are worried sick about where at least some of these girls got to.”
Towards the end of the afternoon, with a solid working relationship having been established between DI Parry’s team and Harbir, Bill offered to drive the helpful DS back to Walsall, and having discovered that he’d done an advanced driving course, offered to let him drive the Subaru. It seemed the least he could do in compensation, because Harbir was already getting harassing phone-calls from Setty demanding updates. If he was driving he had every reason not to answer his phone, and after the first time Bill had picked it up instead, strangely, Setty gave up calling. That at least made for a peaceful drive back, and Bill was well impressed with Harbir’s handling of his personal pride and joy, making him all the more determined to see what he could do to get Harbir away from Setty.
Once back home, though, he knew that he must stay well away from things for now. He’d pushed his luck as hard as he dared, and he knew that he’d been beyond lucky that nobody had as yet wondered why he’d been the one to show up when all these various bodies had been found. Luckily he knew that Carol would keep him informed, but he also had the feeling that Harbir might be ringing him up on the quiet. Yet given the time that had elapsed, he felt he could at least give Tim Chesterton a ring and ask him how the Hereford investigation was going, even if he made it clear he wasn’t asking in any official capacity.
So having got through until Saturday doing just normal time-off things, like going for long walks and pub lunches, Bill rang Tim’s mobile number, and when he answered asked him out for a drink.
“Obviously I can’t ask you about stuff in an official sense,” Bill said genially, “but I couldn’t help wondering if you managed to trace that other poor kid we found? So I thought that rather than put you on the spot at work, it might be easier if we just met up somewhere.”
To his surprise, Tim jumped at the chance. “Tonight? Only the missus and kids are off to some school version of Les Miserables, and she didn’t get me a ticket, knowing that the chances would be that I’d be working tonight – only I’m not. And to be honest, I’d welcome the chance to talk to someone else from the force who’s not directly involved.”
That sounded as though Tim might be having fun dealing with the Serious Case unit, for which he had Bill’s sympathy. And so at seven o’clock, Bill found himself parking near the swimming pool in Hereford, and walking up to the old packhorse bridge to The Saracen’s Head. There was a tiny seating area outside right by the river bank backed by a wall, and that meant that they could see who was close by and might be listening. Tim was already there and had claimed the farth
est little patio table from the pub itself, and so as soon as he’d got himself a pint of coke – manfully resisting the real ale since he had to drive back to Worcester – Bill went and joined him.
“God, am I glad to see a friendly face,” Tim said from the heart. “We ended up having a right old barney with the Serious Case lot! My governor was spitting feathers that we’d had the original Pickersleigh case whipped away from us so fast that we never got chance to establish what was going on, and that in fact we were looking at a murder case. And they got all defensive saying that it had been important to establish Pickersleigh’s role in the paedophile ring – which I get, because there are living kids still being preyed upon. But they just didn’t share information. That’s what’s caused the problems. It’s gone all the way up to the Chief Constable, you know.”
“Bloody hell,” Bill said sympathetically. That sounded as though it was turning into a blame-shifting operation, and he could understand why Tim – as one of the least senior men involved – would be worried about becoming the scapegoat.
“Thank God for Dr Whitmore,” Tim carried on. “She at least has played fair with us, sending us copies of all of her findings.”
“Oh, Carol’s good like that,” Bill agreed. “She’s been at this game long enough to know what it can get like with different teams involved. Mind you, she does it because she’s no wish to end up like a colleague in another area, who got hauled over the coals for not having shared information when really it ought to have been passed on by others.”