Vicious Cycle (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 9)

by Oliver Davies

  There was a piece of paper stuck to the door, on the inside of the glass.

  Our dear customers,

  Due to a tragic, personal event, L’agneau will be closed for the remainder of the week. We will miss you all, and we hope you will think of us in our grief.

  A bientôt,

  Victor and Sabine.

  As Harris read the note aloud, I walked over to the windows, thankfully tall enough that I could see over the fog. The tables were all stacked up, chairs propped up, clear of any glassware or candles. There was no sign of life in the place. I walked to the window on the other side of the door and peered in, over to where the booth table sat in the corner. The chair at the end was still on the floor, and faintly, from my distance and through the glass, I could see cutlery still on the table, a wine glass glinting faintly.

  “The booth table is still set up,” I told Harris, shivering. “But none of the others.”

  “If I were an optimist, I’d say they’ve left it there for themselves, but I don’t know anyone who eats in their own restaurant, do you?”

  “Not off the top of my head,” I replied. Though, to be fair, I just didn’t know anyone who owned a restaurant.

  “They come in the evening, right?” Harris asked.

  “Usually late, when the customers are low anyway,” I replied.

  “And Julia Brook took special care with them.”

  I nodded. “Noted what sort of bread and wine they preferred on the table.”

  Harris turned to me. “French or Italian?”

  “French.”

  She made a face. “Biel.”

  “It’s a French restaurant, Harris. Maybe they liked the house red.”

  “She made a note about it, Thatcher,” Harris pushed. “Their preference for French wine over Italian was so important that she noted it down. And everyone knows that Italian wine is the best wine.”

  “Careful, you could start another world war throwing around statements like that.”

  Harris waved a hand through the air. “Either way, they were important, and their usual table is still set up, even though the rest of the restaurant is closed. Why? Are they going to call all the staff in to serve one table? Do they need their business, or are they scared about what saying no would mean?”

  “This is a lot of what-ifs, Harris, and if we want to get eyes on the place, we need something solid. And given that there’s no real connection to our case yet, I can’t pull that string with Sharp.”

  Harris blew out an irritated breath, looking at me with her hands on her hips.

  “You’re right. You’re annoying me, but you’re right. Fine,” she dropped her hands and turned to the street. “I’ll follow up some old leads and see if anything comes up.”

  “Thank you,” I said, steering her from the restaurant. “Can you spare the time for that?”

  “I just closed up a case, so you’re in luck.”

  “I heard,” I recalled quickly. “Someone was growing weed?”

  “A shed load, Thatcher, my goodness. You could get high just standing in that barn.”

  I chuckled, looking up at the grey sky as we made our way back to the station. I hoped that Mills and Fry had been successful while we were gone and that we might have a name or two to really look into. Maybe even one that rang a few bells with Harris, who walked, still irritated, beside me, her breaths turning cloudy in the cold air. I hoped it would warm up soon, and that we weren’t in for another freezing spring.

  Ten

  Thatcher

  When we got back to the station, Harris headed off back to her desk, ready to start following up some old sources who might have an answer for us. I trusted that she had a few people, whether clean and on the streets or maybe even in jail, who might have some knowledge about a county lines gang. If there was one starting to operate in the city, it’d be all hands-on deck for the entire station, not just for Harris’s squad. However, I did have to admit that I found the image of a little old man in a village on the moors having an interest in heroin rather amusing and a bit of stretch. I left her to it, though, and as she walked off, waving over her shoulder, she was still muttering under her breath.

  I shook my head, laughing quietly, and strode up the stairs to the office.

  Mills and Fry had pulled together a small list of regulars from the restaurant who they thought might be worth looking into, but with the hour of the day growing late, I just made a few copies of the list and sent the two of them home. We had all day tomorrow to get stuck into that, or at least until Crowe got back to me with her completed autopsy. And I didn’t think that making them hunch over their screens in the dying light would be good for any of us.

  Before I left, pulling my coat on and turning off the lights in the office, I looked at the box of files Fry had bought in, and without giving it a second thought, stuffed everything back into the box, grabbed Cora’s statement from the Brook family, tucked it under my arm and strode from the station, sticking it hurriedly in the boot of my car. There was nobody else out in the car park to see me, a small thing to be grateful for. My phone started ringing as I walked round to the front seat, and I fished it from my pocket, answering as I slid into the chilly car.

  “Hello?” I answered, realising that I didn’t actually check to see who was calling me.

  “It’s me,” Liene’s voice answered. “I’m calling you from the phone in the archives,” she told me. Her voice did sound rather echoey.

  “You alright?” I asked, checking my watch. Liene usually got home before I did, and I wasn’t exactly leaving the office early today.

  “I’m fine, but I’m going to have to stay late here and sort this shambles out,” she sighed. “I’ll be a few hours yet.”

  “No worries,” I told her, turning the engine on and directing a heater towards my face. “Let me know when you’re on your way back, and I’ll put some food on for you.” I wasn’t sure what food we had in the house, but I’d throw something together.

  “You’re a saint. How did it go?” she asked tentatively. “With Jeannie?”

  “Quick,” I answered honestly. “We didn’t have many details to give her, to be honest. And Billie dropped by with some food.”

  “Did she stop to take the stone out of her shoe first?”

  “No, she came the whole bloody way with it.”

  Liene laughed softly. “Mad girl. I’ll see you later then, love.”

  “Don’t get lost in the archives.”

  “No promises,” she said lightly, hanging up a second later. I dropped my phone in the passenger seat and sighed. I didn’t really want to go home and knock about the place on my own. I sat there for a bit, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, and a thought occurred to me. Since she wouldn’t be home for a few hours, I might as well not go home for a few hours too.

  I pulled out from the station car park and hit the main road, driving up and out of the city into the countryside. Despite the fact that spring was on the way, it was still getting dark early, with the streetlights all flickering on as I drove past them and once I was out in the hills, the only light came from the occasional building or other cars with their headlights on.

  Even the village was dark, a few windows lit up with an orange glow. I pulled up to the coaching house, my headlights lighting up the front, and looked at it for a while.

  A few years ago, it had been a hollow shell of a building with broken, boarded-up windows, collapsing stairs and walls and floors riddled with holes. Now, it looked more like the coaching house I’d known as a lad. Several years of manual labour, all done by me, and the walls were fixed, most of them painted, the floorboards were fixed, the roof patched up, the windows replaced. I’d planted a wisteria by the front door that hopefully would bloom this spring. The garden was still an unquestionable mess, but the rest of it, the rest of it would have made her proud. I certainly hope it would have done, anyway.

  I turned the engine off and climbed from the car, grabbed my box from the boo
t and unlocked the front door, flicking the light switch. A dim, ghostly light filled the main room, casting shadows in the corners and highlighting the rather large cobwebs up by the beams. I ignored them and set the box down on the floor, shrugged my coat off and used it to sit on, reaching in.

  Twenty years.

  I remembered it well. The Detective Inspector on the case had been a mentor of mine, Muckley, and she’d gone down to join Scotland Yard after that.

  I remembered the first victim, pulling her file from the box.

  Olivia Barry.

  I could remember seeing her body, one of the first murder victims I’d ever seen, throat slit, three slashes on the chest. She’d been found in the middle of a field, and the shepherd that had found her had almost had a heart attack. I remembered coming home that day, sitting in the dark living room drinking a whiskey, contemplating calling my mother. I hadn’t.

  A few weeks later, the second victim.

  Minu Sing. She’d been found in a public garden, lying by a bed of lavender, little purple buds falling on her face and hair.

  Monika Borowiec had been third. Her body was discovered by a lake.

  The last victim, before the killer had seemingly vanished, had also been the youngest of the victims. Twenty years old, the same age as Billie, I realised now with a grimace.

  Clare Manston, found in the moors in a red dress like a Kate Bush video.

  Four of them, altogether. Five now, if it was the same man.

  The case had gone cold, and a few weeks later, I’d been looking at another dead woman.

  Marie Thatcher.

  I’d not been there to say goodbye, and it was harder to look at her in her hospital bed and dressing gown than it had been to look at the other four, bloodied and cold.

  I closed my eyes now, tilting my head up to the ceiling, as though I might hear her up there again, dancing over the creaky floorboards to sneak down here in the middle of the night for a biscuit or singing, poorly, to herself as she cleaned. I was a very different man twenty years ago, and a lot had changed. I’d met Jeannie that day, the day Olivia’s body had been found. I was already in a bad mood, and then all of a sudden, this young, short red-headed woman started pestering me for information about the case, hanging around, impossible to get rid of. Impossible to ignore. That had been the start of it, and for the past twenty years, she’d waltzed in and out of my life. This morning had been no different, but to my pleasant surprise, I wasn’t thinking about her the way I used to. She’d knocked me off kilter a little, but I supposed that happened to anyone who suddenly saw their ex again. My head was, for the most part, full of three things. The case, Billie and Liene. Twenty years ago, hell, five years ago, and I’d only been thinking about Jeannie.

  A very different man, indeed.

  And a very different Inspector, as Sharp had reminded me.

  The sort of man who would answer his mother’s phone calls and stop acting like a four- years old and the sort of man who knew how to find a bloody killer.

  I opened my eyes and looked back down at the files I had brought with me. If Sharp found out that I’d taken them from the station, she’d give me a wallop over the ear, but the case was technically cold, so I figured it would be alright. So long as I got there before she did in the morning and the desk sergeant didn’t rat me out. Maybe I’d take him a muffin as a precaution.

  The names were familiar, all the details were. I could recite them from heart, sometimes did when I felt like I was getting too big for my boots and needed to be brought back down to earth.

  Olivia Barry, twenty-four years old, brown hair, brown eyes, working as a maid in a hotel in the city.

  Minu Singh, twenty-three years old, black hair, brown eyes, working as a tour guide for the city.

  Monika Borowiec, twenty-five years old, blonde hair, blue eyes, sitting front desk at a spa.

  Clare Manston, twenty years old, brown hair, blue eyes, a university student working in her local pub by the river.

  I froze.

  A university student.

  A thought jolted through me, and I reached for her file. I’d been thorough on that job. I looked into her hobbies, her clubs, anywhere she went, anyone she saw. She’d been part of a society at university, a conservation society.

  Conservation!

  Out in the countryside, somewhere beautiful, somewhere where it would be easy to take them.

  I reached for Cora’s report from the Brook family and skimmed through, flipping through the pages fast enough to give myself a paper cut, ideas racing through my head, images of the place she was found, her body in the long grass, the stickers in her room. Save the Whales, WWF, a poster for tiger adoption.

  They cared about it, the environment, the landscape. He’d taken them to beautiful places.

  There it was. A short little note Cora had made about Julia’s life at university. A Bachelor’s degree in Environment, Economics and Ecology. A different degree to Clare, but it was the same university here in York, and yes, they’d belonged to the same society.

  I sat back, letting out a heavy breath, something clicking into place.

  “A lead,” I said softly. A common denominator. Something that somehow linked these two girls over twenty years. Maybe the other girls had the same passions, and we just hadn’t known. I wish I had lists for them, information from their families or roommates about what their interests had been, but we’d never got any and twenty years down the line, I wouldn’t really be able to ask. But this was something. It had to be something. Nothing else linked the girls.

  I wondered if that meant Jeannie’s tip was no good, that this was in no way connected to the old drug gang, and that Harris was wasting her time barking up the wrong tree. I shook my head, getting ahead of myself.

  Clare had belonged to a conservation group. So had Julia.

  She had a passion, probably talked about it. Perhaps there was even someone from that group who crossed both of their paths, someone to link them together.

  I’d need to ask. Need to head to the Brook family and ask them about it, Julia’s club, her passion. Did she ever go on protests or volunteer? How often?

  Again, getting ahead of myself. But we had something at long last, something that made these separate murders twenty years apart make some sort of sense. I shoved everything back in the box and jumped to my feet, brushing some dust off the legs of my trousers and picked my coat off the floor, giving it a shake. A dead woodlouse fell to the floor, and I grimaced at the sight. This place needed cleaning, though I got the idea that I’d have to wear a bloody hazmat suit when tackling some of the cobwebs up there. Maybe I could get Mills to do it, though with his allergies, it might kill him.

  I shut the box and pulled on my coat but didn’t leave just yet. A different man, the sort who didn’t go hiding from things. I turned on the upstairs light and walked up the stairs to the first floor, leaving footprints in the dust.

  A few doors were open, the smell of fresh pain still hanging in the air, but one was closed and had been closed for a long time.

  I turned the door handle and wandered in, standing in the doorway.

  I had been in, of course, to replaster the walls and fix the floors. The green wallpaper was back up too. The room didn’t look itself without it. I could remember this room easily.

  The bed had its head against the right wall, square in the middle, white sheets, always white sheets, forever blowing in the wind because the window was always open come rain or shine. There had been a desk over by the window, a vase of fresh flowers, a jug of water and various knick-knacks that either she had collected or that I had brought in from the garden. A screen in the corner to change behind because she thought they were classy and a chair there for when she was too lazy to hang them up in the wardrobe against the other wall, hand-painted by my grandmother.

  I still had all the furniture. The sheets and curtains had been lost to moths and mildew, but I had the bed, the desk, and the wardrobe, and I could put them all
back, right where she’d left them.

  Or I could buy furniture.

  I swallowed, my mouth suddenly very dry, my eyes too, and I remembered what I’d said to Harris earlier about being desensitised to crying.

  I had one last long look at the room, remembering everything exactly where it was until I could smell the flowers and the clean sheets and the perfume, then I stepped out and pulled the door shut, holding onto the handle a second longer before dropping my hand, turning on my heel and walking to the stairs.

  I grabbed the box from the floor and let myself out, locking the door behind me. As I shoved it back into the boot, I glanced over to Elsie’s cottage. The kitchen light was on, but the curtains were drawn, so I got in my car and drove home, stopping by the shop on my way to pick up Liene’s favourite pasta.

  Eleven

  Thatcher

  It wasn’t often that I woke up before my alarm, but last night, I’d barely been able to sleep. I managed to snag a few hours here and there, my dreams scattered and unmemorable, but mostly I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling with thoughts racing around my head. I thought mostly about the case, of Julia and her job and the restaurant, of the women twenty years before, of my mother and the coaching house and Elsie and Liene and Billie and Sally. Not a very restful or productive night all told.

  The sun was coming through the curtains, the angle landing the ray directly on my face, and I grunted, rolling onto my side and fumbling around for my phone, looking at the time. Fifteen minutes until the alarm.

  I made it through three of those minutes, laying straight on my back and then I flipped the sheets back and climbed out, rubbing my face as I padded into the bathroom and into the shower. I washed quickly, brushed my teeth and changed, but when I left the bathroom, barely any time had passed. I grabbed my things from the room, careful not to wake Liene, and wandered out to the kitchen, digging through the cupboard for the old stove-top coffee pot Sally had given me a few years ago. I found it, brushed off some dust and got it brewing on the stove, sitting with a bowl of cereal as I waited. The smell filled the room, wafting down the hall, and it drew Liene from bed, strolling into the kitchen with my dressing gown wrapped around her.