by M K Farrar
After lunch, the prisoner officers took the next shift, including Nicholas, back to the workshop. He kept his head down, focusing on each of the zips that needed to be attached to the jackets, ignoring everyone around him. Fish didn’t work in here—he was on cleaning duty—so at least that was one person Nicholas didn’t have to think about right now. He did worry, though—he fretted about later, when they were alone in their cell. Would Fish continue to act like a prick towards him, or would it all be forgotten and he’d be back to normal, asking Nicholas to tell the story about how he’d gouged the first man’s eyes out?
Suddenly, something slammed into the backs of his knees, folding his legs in half. He hadn’t had time to protect himself, and his chin hit the worktable as he went down. He smacked his chin. His teeth snapped together, and pain exploded through his tongue, his mouth filling with the iron tang of blood. He found himself on the floor, spitting blood and trying not to think too hard about why a large chunk of his tongue felt like it was missing.
“What the hell are you doing down there?” Officer Bache shouted from over by the door. “On your feet, and back to work.”
Just like everyone else in this place, Officer Bache seemed to have taken an instant dislike to Nicholas. That he’d killed a police officer’s husband hadn’t done anything to enamour him to them. They saw that as though he’d murdered one of their own.
He wiped his mouth and put out a bloodied hand to pull himself back up to standing. He didn’t even dare look around to see who had hit him. It didn’t matter anyway, it wasn’t as though he’d be able to retaliate. Everyone here had people who backed them up, while he was on his own.
The blood from his cut tongue continued to flow. He wasn’t squeamish—at least not when it came to other people’s blood—but the thick, hot fluid filled his mouth and threatened to spill down his throat. He ducked his head slightly to spit it on the floor. He couldn’t get blood on the jackets, as he’d risk punishment.
He spat, the blood a vivid red against the concrete. How much blood was that? Too much. Still it came, flowing into his mouth, and he was forced to spit again.
“What the fuck, dude?” the prisoner next to him exclaimed, wrinkling his nose at the mess Nicholas had made.
He put his hand to his mouth. “Sorry.” He shouldn’t be sorry. He hadn’t asked to be hit in the back of the legs and to bash his mouth so badly he’d bitten straight through his tongue, but he couldn’t think of anything else he was supposed to say. Besides, his thoughts weren’t working so clearly right now. He’d broken out in a cold sweat, his palms clammy. His legs hurt from where he’d been hit, but now they felt numb and as though they didn’t really belong to him.
With a gut-wrenching certainty, he realised he was going to pass out, and he was going to do so in front of everyone. He couldn’t have got any more pathetic if he tried.
Darkness swept into his vision, and for the second time in a matter of minutes, his legs gave way. He hit the floor hard but was unable to get his body to respond enough to protect his head. He was vaguely aware of voices shouting and people rushing over, before he passed out completely.
Chapter Eight
Erica dropped Poppy off at Breakfast Club at school and then drove into work. She was refreshed and clearheaded compared to the previous day. The sun was already warm, and it really felt as though summer had finally arrived. London had been lulled into a false sense of security when they’d had a couple of warm weeks over April, but then they’d been plunged back into grey skies and rain again up until now. Her mood was further improved by the knowledge Shawn was back in that morning, and the annoying sulking that DC Howard had been doing all week would come to an end. She intended on letting Rudd finish up the Skehan case, though there didn’t appear to have been any developments on it overnight. Hopefully, something would come to light today that would allow them to move forward on it. Right now, they had nothing. It was as though Skehan’s attacker had been plucked out of the back garden and had vanished.
Shawn was in the office when she arrived, his car already in his spot. He was clearly as keen to get back to work as she was to have him.
“Don’t bother taking off your jacket,” he said, walking towards her as she entered. “We’re needed in Hackney. A call just came in. A woman’s body’s been discovered.”
“No easing into things for you,” she said. “Welcome back.”
He grinned at her. “I expect the killer was just waiting for me to get to work.”
“Good thing you’re here then. Let’s go.”
THOUGH CRIME SCENE tape was stretched across the front door of the building, the flat where the woman had been killed was on the first floor. Erica pulled on a pair of gloves from her pocket and ducked under it, Shawn close behind. She trotted up the stairs and took the narrow hallway down to the flat. From the amount of activity around the open front door, it was easy to pinpoint the right one.
If there hadn’t been the activity, they could have followed their noses. The air was ripe with the stench of death.
The police sergeant in charge of the scene was leaning over the bed as they entered. He was around Erica’s age, mid-thirties, with a crop of curly russet hair and freckles across the bridge of his nose that made him look younger and less serious than he actually was.
He straightened. “Detectives, thanks for coming. I’m Sergeant Payne. Our victim is Naomi Conrad, twenty-seven years old, single, as far as we know. The body was found by the neighbours, Andrew and Melinda Long, after they noticed the smell.”
The woman lying on the bed had long blonde hair and a slender figure. She was also naked. From the reek of death in the room, she had been dead for at least a couple of days.
“They’d ignored it at first,” Sergeant Payne continued, “but eventually couldn’t stand it anymore and so they knocked on the front door. When no one answered, Andrew Long tried the door handle and discovered it unlocked. He opened it and called out, but when they didn’t get a response, they checked the rest of the flat, found the body, and called us.”
“Any idea how long she’s been dead?” Erica asked.
“At a guess, forty-eight hours, possibly a little longer, but it’s hard to say for sure until the post-mortem. It’s been warm these last couple of days, which is why the body was discovered. At first glance, it appears she’s been strangled. I’m unsure yet if there was any sexual assault.”
Erica frowned down at the body. What an absolute waste of a beautiful young woman’s life. “Any witnesses?”
“Only the neighbours, so far, but I have officers going door to door. If we can nail down a more precise time of death, it’ll make things easier when we’re questioning the neighbours or checking on any CCTV.”
The Scenes of Crime officer had already bagged the young woman’s hands, in the hope the pathologist would be able to scrape DNA from beneath the nails. If she’d fought back while she was being strangled, she might have scratched her attacker.
Erica took in every detail—the empty wine glass, the discarded bundle of clothes, including the underwear, beside the bed. Though the victim’s face was already showing some signs of bloating, it was easy to see she’d died wearing makeup, including false eyelashes. These girls always seemed to wear so much makeup these days, even when it was clear that, like Naomi Conrad, they were naturally beautiful.
“Looks to me like she’d come home from a night out,” Erica observed. “Since the front door was unlocked, do we think her attacker came in that way?”
Payne nodded. “The windows around the flat were all locked from the inside, so it would appear that whoever killed her just walked out through the front door and down the communal hallway, down the stairs, and through the main front door.”
Erica chewed on her lower lip. “I think we need to consider that Naomi Conrad knew her attacker.”
“Most of them do,” Payne agreed.
“What is it she did for a living?” Shawn asked.
“She’s an”
—Payne flicked inverted commas in the air with his fingers—“‘influencer’, apparently. Online stuff. Makeup and skincare and clothes.”
Cardboard boxes were stacked in the corner of the bedroom next to a circular light on a stand.
“People were sending her stuff,” Erica said. “So, they must have been able to get her address.”
How careful were these people online? They put everything out there, shared every little intimate detail with hundreds of thousands of complete strangers. Had one of them contacted her, promising to send her a freebie that she could then advertise online, and they’d used her information to come to her flat and murdered her instead? It didn’t matter how much they were warned about the dangers of being online, when they were young, they thought they were invincible.
“Does she live alone?” Erica asked.
“According to the neighbours, yes, she does. We can’t find any sign of anyone else living here either.
“Any boyfriend on the scene?”
Payne twisted his lips. “We’re not sure yet.”
“What about family?”
He gestured to a shelf on the bedroom wall. “She has some photographs up, so we think she has parents, possibly a sister, too.”
“We need to track them down. What about the rest of the flat? Was anything taken?”
“We haven’t been able to find her mobile phone, so it’s possible whoever did this took it with them.”
“A memento, perhaps.” Erica looked to Shawn. “Let’s put a trace out on the phone. We might be in luck and whoever has taken it hasn’t switched it off.”
Naomi Conrad’s phone would have had everything about her life on it. All her photographs, all her messages, her social media. Her contacts. If the assailant used her fingerprint to open it before killing her and then changed the code, he could have full access to it.
Sergeant Payne leaned over the body again and used a gloved hand to lift the victim’s blonde hair from her neck, revealing the contusion marks. A flicker of recognition went through Erica, and she frowned. It was as though she’d just had a moment of déjà vu only even more real than normal. Like she’d just been propelled back in time, to a case from a year ago. It had been the lifting of the hair, where it had hidden the bruises and lacerations around the victim’s neck that had done it. From the conjunctival petechial haemorrhage—the red dots on the whites of the eyes—it was clear the woman had been strangled, though until they had a final post-mortem report, it was impossible to know for sure. Strangulation was a common form of domestic abuse and may have been taken too far in this situation, but still, something about the setup rang bells in her head.
“What is it, boss?” Shawn asked from beside her.
She chewed her lower lip and looked around the room. “Does this remind you of anything?”
“Funny you say that, I was just thinking about that case with the brother and sister.”
“Tristan Maher,” she confirmed. “His sister was called Lara.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
Erica wasn’t likely to forget their names any time soon. Tristan Maher had kidnapped her and was going to turn her into one of his paintings. It had happened right before her dad had died, and every detail of those events were burned into her brain. Tristan had been given several life sentences and would be lucky if he ever got to see freedom again, but she didn’t know what had happened to Lara. She imagined the poor woman must have needed to have some serious therapy after living with that monster most of her life. How did it feel to know you shared so much DNA with a serial killer?
“What’s that?” Payne asked.
“Just an old case we worked on,” Erica said. “The victims were all women and strangled in their beds, but the perpetrator is serving several life sentences, so it can’t be the same one.”
“It’s probably just a coincidence,” Shawn said.
Erica raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure I believe in coincidences.”
Payne gestured to the victim. “Strangulation is a common method of murder. We’re most likely looking at a man in her life who was trying to control her, someone she’d possibly already been experiencing violence at the hands of.” He nodded at the lighting setup and the stack of boxes. “Perhaps someone didn’t like the business she was in.”
“A post-mortem will give us an idea of if there was any sexual activity before she died,” Erica said. “We need to look into who Naomi Conrad was. Check if she has a record. I also want all the neighbours interviewed, find out if anyone saw her coming home a couple of nights ago, either alone or with someone. If we can get an idea when she came home, we can check any CCTV from around the area.”
No one liked the idea of being caught on CCTV until they were the victim and wanted the police to catch whoever was the perpetrator of the crime.
Payne nodded. “I’ve got officers going door to door, see if anyone saw anything.”
The similarities to the Tristan Maher case, the one the papers had called The Artisan, continued to niggle at her. Admittedly, the body hadn’t been staged the same way as Maher had done with his victims—she hadn’t been sitting up in bed, for example—but they’d never released details of how the victims had been arranged before he’d left them. They knew now that he’d done so in order to take photographs of the dead women, which he’d then used to recreate in oil on canvas. There had been so many cases, many of which overlapped, so she’d been dealing with more than one at a time, and it was hard to remember the exact details of everyone she’d dealt with.
“There was a time waster involved in that case, wasn’t there?” Shawn said thoughtfully. “Do you remember? He pretended he’d been the one to kill those women.”
She shot him a sharp look. “Yes, you’re right. I don’t suppose you remember his name?”
Shawn thought for a moment and shook his head. “Sorry, no, but it’ll be in the case files.”
“You think it’s possible he’s decided to take things a step further?”
“It’s possible. We know it can’t be Tristan Maher ’cause he’s behind bars, and I’d say it’s unlikely to be the sister. She would have been the same size as the victim and would have been evenly matched, unless she was drugged or something, which the post-mortem will reveal.”
“You don’t think this is just a coincidence then,” she said. “You think this might be connected to the Maher case?”
“That’s not what I’m saying, but you always say that we should keep our minds open to all possibilities when we’re working on a case. This is just me, keeping my mind open.”
It was true, she did say that.
She exhaled a breath and resisted the urge to rub her eyes—she was still wearing her gloves.
The Scenes of Crime officer emerged from the bathroom holding a clear bag with something inside it. “Thought you’d want to know about this.”
Erica frowned at the item. A used condom. She grimaced. “I assume that’s semen in the tip.”
The officer lifted it to get a better view. “I’d say you’re right.”
She glanced over her shoulder at Shawn. “You think a killer would be stupid enough to have sex with his victim, strangle her, and then dispose of a used condom filled with his DNA into the bathroom bin?”
Shawn shrugged. “There are plenty of cases of criminals making stupid mistakes.”
Erica considered all possibilities. “Or our victim was the one who put the condom in the bin, and the killer didn’t notice.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Or the condom doesn’t belong to the killer.”
That was probably more likely, but if that was the case, it wasn’t going to help them at all. The DNA they’d get from the body and from the condom might belong to the wrong person.
“We’re going to need to track down whoever that condom belonged to,” Erica said. “Even if he wasn’t the person who murdered Naomi Conrad, he might have seen or heard something that could help us.”
She was determined
to get more leads from the case than they currently had with the Skehan one. She refused to let another criminal go unpunished today.
Chapter Nine
Erica left the building and called DC Rudd. “Any updates on the Skehan case?”
It was normal for her to handle more than one case at a time. Not that Brandon’s case wasn’t important, but murders took precedence over assault, even if that assault was a vicious one with a knife.
She was going to need to ask Gibbs for some more detectives if their team was going to make progress on either of the cases.
“No big leads, I’m afraid. I’m worried this one is going to go cold on us.”
“Me, too. What about the victim? How’s he doing?”
“He’s being discharged today, so he must be doing all right. He actually called the office and asked if he could speak to you. He said he’d remembered something about the attack.”
A little jolt of hope went through her. Hopefully, he’d remembered something important. “Okay, I’ll try and swing by before they let him out.”
“I can do that, boss,” Rudd offered.
“No, it’s fine. He knows me now. It’s better if I go.”