Mr Brook nodded. “Around then, yes.”
“How long had she worked at the restaurant?” Mills asked.
“God, years now,” Mr Brook said. “She started there during university, and she just loves it. They treated her like family, too, so she stayed on, even after she finished her degree. I think they’ll have her take over one day.” His tone was proud before realising his mistake. When he did, his face fell.
“We’ll go and speak to them,” I said. “See what they can tell us. What about friends? Who was she close to?”
“Laura,” Mrs Brook said. “She used to live next door until she moved away. And Lisa, of course,” she added as she walked back, holding her baby on her hip. Julia’s older sister’s face was pink from crying, and she sniffed.
“I called Noah,” she said as she sat down. “My husband. He’s leaving work now.”
“She’s beautiful,” Cora said softly, looking at the baby. “How old is she?”
“Thank you,” Lisa sniffed. “Eight months.”
“O’Flynn here is a family liaison officer,” I told them. “She will be your first point of contact should you wish to speak to any of us, and she’ll help you however she can.”
She gave them a warm, polite smile. “I’ve been told I’m easier to talk to than him,” she said conspiratorially as she nodded to me, managing to get a faint laugh from Mrs Brook. Cora dug out a card and placed it on the table by her knee. “You can call me anytime, and I’ll be over in the drop of a hat.”
“Thank you,” Mrs Brook replied earnestly.
“What happens next?” Mr Brook asked.
“Next,” I breathed deeply. “We carry on with our investigation, try to figure out who this man was. Anything that you can tell us about Julia would be a huge help.”
“You can check her room,” Mrs Brook offered, pointing up the stairs. “Second on the right.”
“Thank you,” I said, genuinely grateful for the offer. Mills and I left Cora with them and headed up the creaky stairs to the first-floor landing through the second door on the right.
It had clearly been Julia’s bedroom for some time, painted and repainted so that where it peeled by the window, I could see different colours all layered together. A bed was pushed against the wall, photographs stuck all over in a giant mosaic.
“She was a photographer,” Mills remarked, picking up a camera from the chest of drawers. She was also messy, I noticed, with clothes on the floor, books scattered here and there, the shelves lined with trinkets from little boxes to snow globes and wooden figures.
I walked over to her bedside table, pulling a pair of gloves on before I pulled the drawer open. There was a spare phone charger inside, a few nails files, some pillow spray designed to help you sleep, and a journal. I pulled it out, opening the page to this week.
She’d noted all her shifts down, along with “babysitting for Lisa” one afternoon, “take dad to the garden centre” the next morning, and yesterday, she’d simply written “walk” with a little heart beside it. No name, annoyingly.
“Might come in handy,” I remarked, standing up. “Got anything, Isaac?”
“Laptop.” He held it up over his shoulder. He was by the chest of drawers, looking through carefully. “Not much else, though. Can’t see anything here that someone would kill her for.”
I shook my head. There had never been a motive before. That’s what had made it so hard to solve.
“Oh,” Mills said, bending down and picking a piece of clothing from the floor. It was an apron with a little logo in the corner, and he looked inside the pockets. “L’agneau.” He lifted his eyebrows, pulling out a little wad of cash.
“Someone got tipped well,” he remarked, placing the money on the drawers. “Nothing else.”
“I didn’t think there would be,” I sighed, “but we’ll take these, give them a proper scour through and hope that we can at least find out who this mystery man of hers was.”
Mills nodded, draping the apron over the bedpost, and I handed him the journal before leaving the room, shutting the door carefully behind us. As we headed down the stairs, Cora appeared from the living room with a smile. Mr Brook was behind her, and Mills held up the laptop and journal.
“May we take these?” he asked.
Mr Brook held up his hands. “Take anything, my boy, anything at all.”
“We’ll get out of your hair,” I said. “And again, Mr Brook, we are so sorry for your loss.”
He just smiled at the sentiment and walked us to the door, pulling it open and letting us out.
“I should have played the overprotective dad more,” he said regrettably. “Demanded to meet the man. If I had—”
“Mr Brook,” I interrupted him. “There is nothing you could have done. The fault of this lies solely with one man, and I will do everything I can to find him and bring him to justice. Whatever that’s worth.”
Mr Brook gave me an even look, his eyes teary, then held out his hand. I shook it once, then stepped back and walked down to the car, hearing the door close behind me. Cora and Mills hovered by the car.
“Anything?” I asked Cora as we all climbed in.
“Nothing much,” she said, “but I’ll visit them tomorrow when they’ve had time to process and speak to them again.”
“You’re a treasure, O’Flynn,” I said, tipping my head back and closing my eyes.
As Mills started the engine, I heard her say quietly from the back seat, “I’d like that on a t-shirt.”
I smiled, despite myself, happy to be distracted by her and Mills’s chatter as we drove back to the station, ready to get stuck in.
Four
Thatcher
There was a buzz in the station by the time we arrived, the case and its resemblance to the past was stirring interest, so I was hardly surprised when Mills and I walked upstairs to be summoned into Sharp’s office. She waved us in, unusually quiet, and we sat down at her desk as she shut the door, glaring at the nosy officers who lingered outside. With a sigh, she sat down and looked over at me with an almost pitying expression on her face.
“So, boys,” she said, “what do we know?”
“Julia Brook,” I told her. “A waitress in a restaurant in town went for a walk yesterday with her mysterious boyfriend and never came back.”
“Succinct, Thatcher, thank you,” she drawled.
“Julia’s mother received a few texts from her yesterday,” Mills pushed on. “We think the killer must have sent them to make it seem like Julia was only going to stay with a friend.”
“To explain her absence,” Sharp nodded. “What about this boyfriend?”
“None of her family has met him,” Mills said, “never even seen him, actually. But we know that he met her at the restaurant she works in, so one of her colleagues might know the chap. Or at least, know what he looks like.”
Sharp nodded, her fingertips pressed together in an arch below her chin, her eyes fixed on my face.
“You’re quiet,” she observed.
“Thinking.”
“Mh-hm. I’ve not failed to see the resemblance either, Thatcher. Nor have other people.” She sighed. “Which means we need to get on with this as quickly and quietly as we are able to. If the city learns that a killer has resurfaced and is targeting young women again, the press will have a bloody field day. I’ll handle the bosses,” she assured us, holding up a hand, “keep the story under control, but there’s only so much I can do, and we’ll need answers sooner rather than later.”
“We’re on it, boss,” Mills said with an affirmative nod.
“Max?” She looked at me.
“Let me access the old files,” I said, stretching my neck to one side, then the other. “Refresh myself on the details, check for any more similarities that we could track.”
Sharp nodded. “I meant what I said before, Thatcher. I’ll help you with this in whatever way I can.”
“Much appreciated, ma’am.”
“You need anything
else?”
“I’d like to commandeer Fry if that’s alright. She on any other cases?”
Sharp waved a dismissive hand. “None more important than this. Take her. Call it a training exercise.”
I chuckled. “Don’t know what HQ would say about that.”
“When they get off their arses and look at a dead girl in the moors, I’ll ask them what they bloody think,” she replied tartly, reaching for her computer and hitting a few keys. “I’ll get those old files for you. Anything from Crowe yet?”
“Not yet, but I’m sure she’ll get something soon,” Mills answered.
Another nod from Sharp, and then she flicked her hand at us. We rose from the desk and wandered from the room, heading back over to our office. I pulled my coat off, rolling up my sleeves as we walked in and dragged the board over to the middle of the room. I placed a picture of Julia in the middle, then sat on the end of my desk and sighed.
An empty board, just like last time.
Unlike last time, Mills leant on the desk beside me and tapped his fingers against the wood.
“I don’t suppose I can be much help here, sir. I wasn’t here last time.”
“Fresh perspective might be useful,” I offered.
“Still, it might be useful if I headed out to the restaurant, got a start there, maybe get us a name or something.”
I looked sideways at him. “You sure?”
He shrugged. “Divide and conquer, right?”
I chuckled and gave him a nudge with my elbow. “Clear out then, Julius Caesar, and let me know what you find.”
He perked up, eyes brightening, and patted down his pockets to make sure that he had everything he needed before walking towards the door.
“Send Fry in for me, will you, Isaac?”
“Replacing me already?” he asked with a grin, slipping from the room.
I looked back at the board. We had a restaurant. I supposed that was something, and I knew that Mills would be able to get results from that place in some shape or other.
The door pushed open then, and Fry wandered in, a massive cardboard box in her arms. I watched as she gripped it determinedly, walked over to Mills’s empty desk, and dumped it with a thud.
“Case files,” she sighed, waving a hand over the box. I pushed up from the desk and walked over, cracking the lid back. “Awfully heavy for just some files, sir. What else have you got going on in there?”
“Evidence, notes, any scrap of information I thought might come in handy one day,” I muttered, picking up the old folders, my youthful handwriting looping across the pages, barely legible to me.
“Sharp tells me it was a big case,” she commented, picking up a sheet of paper. “Could it be a copycat?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “But a good copycat will follow all the guidelines of the first one, so we should be able to spot some trends. And a copycat is rarely as good.”
Fry was looking at me, a faint crease between her eyebrows. “I can’t tell if you want it to be a copycat or not, sir.”
I sighed. “Me neither, Fry. Yes and no, I suppose.”
A copycat would mean that the past wasn’t coming back to haunt me anytime soon, but it also meant that the first killer was still out there, living free because I had failed to catch them. If they were back, I could fix that mistake, the only one from those years ago that I could fix.
“Wow,” Fry muttered, pulling an old newspaper from the box. “Look how young you look. And Dr Crowe! Aw.”
“She’ll be able to tell us if we’re dealing with a copycat,” I told Fry. “There were details of the killings that we never released to the public.”
“I doubt that will take her long,” Fry commented.
“She’ll be thorough,” I replied. “Slow and steady, which is good. We need to be sure.”
Fry nodded slowly, then she shrugged her coat off, draped it over the back of Mills’s chair, and looked up at me.
“Where do we start then, sir?”
I reached into the box, pulled out a handful of documents and handed them over to her.
“Look for anything that looks like a pattern,” I told her.
“Starting without me?” Sharp drawled, striding into the room fast enough the Fry almost dropped her armful of papers. “How rude, Thatcher.” She had three mugs with her, and she passed a coffee to me and then to Fry before grabbing a bunch of files herself. She settled down at my desk, smiling at the photograph of my mother.
“God, this takes me back,” she muttered. “You had better hair back then.”
“I was in my twenties. Hair is always better in your twenties. Look at Fry,” I pointed out, grabbing a spare chair and sitting beside her. Fry’s hair, though plaited and twisted back from her face, was very long and very shiny, and I’d caught Mills admiring it from afar once or twice before, notably at the Christmas party when she’d let it down.
“Old Michaels with Chief back then,” Sharp carried on. “Remember him? Old windbag.”
“He hung on for dear life at the end,” I said before telling Fry, “The man was reluctant to retire.”
“I think this was the case that packed him in, in the end,” Sharp added.
“Thank God for that, else we wouldn’t have you.”
“Compliments.” She shook her head at Fry. “You know he’s rattled when he dolls out the compliments.”
“Duly noted, ma’am,” Fry replied, taking a sip of her coffee and looking down at her pile. “Your handwriting was awful, sir.”
“I know,” I muttered, studying the confusing loops and spikes with a frown.
“Thank God for computers,” Sharp added. “Imagine if I had to read all your reports handwritten.”
“It would be a good test of character,” I said.
“It’d be hell on earth, and I’d need a good raise and some hefty prescription glasses,” she retorted, glancing down.
We were quiet for a bit, sipping coffee and trying to understand the erratic notes I had made. They got worse as the case went on. The longer we went without finding the killer, the seemingly madder I became.
“The locations are all the same,” Fry muttered, pulling out a map of the local area. “All rural.” She grabbed a pen, drew a dot over each one, and carried it over to the board, sticking it up and adding a fifth dot for Julia Brook.
“They’re never more than forty or so minutes from the city,” she pointed out, tracing her pen from dot to dot. The dots formed a loose circle around the city, all roughly the same distance from the centre.
“He’s based in the city then,” Sharp commented.
“Same pattern,” I said, tapping my pen against my chin. “He got them out, away from the crowds, somewhere quiet, but always somewhere where they’d be found. By a farm, or a walking route, or a river. The bodies were never there for more than a day.”
Fry frowned at that, turning to the board. “Stabbed to death?”
“Throats slit,” I answered.
“Quick, then,” she said. “He took them somewhere quiet, rural, gave them a quick death in a place where he knew someone would find them.”
“What are you thinking?” Sharp asked her, looking intrigued.
“That maybe he didn’t kill them just for the sake of killing them. He was trying to be, I dunno, it sounds ridiculous, but kind in some way. He could have killed them and dumped them, never to be found, but he didn’t.”
“Because he wanted to be known,” I suggested. “He wanted people to know that he could do it.”
“I can’t explain it.” Fry shook her head slightly. “I just feel like there’s a certain reluctance to how he’s doing it. How he did it,” she amended hastily.
“She’s got a point, Thatcher,” Sharp said, looking around at me. “Throat slit is a quick death. Women usually meet gristlier ends.”
“What about the other wounds then?” I asked, rifling through the photographs for some pictures of the first victims. I got up, spreading them out on the floor. Fry
looked down at them with a wince.
Three stab wounds, just as before, down the chest.
“A calling card or a message?” Fry suggested.
“A message? A message to who?” I asked.
Fry looked up, meeting my gaze and shifted on her feet. I gave her a small smile.
“I did the same thing to Mills,” I told her. “Push your thoughts, always push them as far as they can take you.”
“Let’s focus on similarities,” Sharp announced. “We have the location, the style of killing. The girl herself seems to be his type. Young, unattached.”
“Closer to her family, though,” I said. “The other girls were solitary in some way or another, no family, few friends. Julia still lived at home, saw her sister on a regular basis.”
But otherwise, she matched the others. Young and pretty, working somewhere inconsequential. No big career women, nobody with a lot of income or any dependents, nobody with ties to any strange businessmen or women or any unusual relatives. Just everyday girls plucked off the street and led out into the moors and fields.
“They look peaceful,” Fry observed, looking down at the photographs again.
Another pattern. He’d lay them down in the grass, eyes closed, hair splayed beneath them, the flowers growing up around them. Never a road, never mud or water, always dry. He didn’t, I had to agree with Fry, seem to hate them in any way. There was a reverence to his killing, a carefulness with the women that you didn’t usually see in cases like these. They almost looked like women from classical paintings, from a poem or a play that Mills would be able to identify, laid out in nature. Only instead of flowers and cherubs, they had slit throats and three slashes down their chests. Always three.
“How long had Julia been seeing the man?” Fry asked me.
“Her parents say about a month,” I answered.
She chewed her lip. “He was with her for a month to do this. So that she’d trust him enough to leave her phone and go into the moors with him?”
“Seems so,” I answered.
“Surely he’d have to feel something for her, just a little,” she said. “You don’t spend a month with someone and not care a little, even if it just means you give them a quick death.”
Vicious Cycle (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 9) Page 4