“Better get that right,” I said.
“For what?”
I shrugged and sat down at my desk. I could feel him look at me questioningly for a bit longer before he turned back to the board. He was putting together a timeline, including the first killings, noting the space in-between and let him stick to that as I opened Julia’s notebook and skimmed back several pages.
I found an entry, thankfully dated, from three weeks ago that caught my eye.
For Antoine: Less Dijon in the sauce next time, unless you wanted to clear my sinuses out. Fine for us, but customers might find it too strong. The Tart Tatin is good. Maybe try with pears.
Summer dessert options: Madeleines, macarons etc., a selection (less heavy than a big dessert).
The table’s booked for Saturday boys, so another later shift. Check wine stock in cellar and make sure their bottle is in. Big, sweet tooth will be joining them, mention profiteroles to Victor.
New regular came back. He has the same badge on his jacket as me (little badger). Seems nice, tips well, rather handsome. I hope he comes back – must learn his name.
I took it that the new stranger who interested her with a badger pin is the one we’re looking for, but she didn’t learn his name at first. I wondered where that pin was now. There’d been no sign of it on her body or in her room that I had seen, and SOCO hadn’t found anything at the scene.
The mention of the “Saturday boys”, as she called them, caught my eye. The wine cellar needed checking, and she mentioned the arrival of another to their party, one with a sweet tooth that apparently warranted a special dessert being made. I wondered if Harris would be interested in that, but Sharp wouldn’t like me following that trial when this one was laid before us.
Fry wandered back, three mugs in hand, and handed one to each of us.
“Any mention?” She asked me, her eyes dropping to the notebook.
“She’s met him, but she doesn’t mention his name.”
“She might not,” Mills said, turning around, his mug cradled between his fingers. “If she kept that notebook for work, then once they became an item, she might have kept it separate.”
It was likely there was no mention of anyone else she knew, her family, for instance, in the book, apart from when she needed to book a day off to babysit or drive her father somewhere. Other than noting his pin, his generous tipping and the fact he was handsome, she gives nothing else. No clue as to his age or anything, which left me feeling a little annoyed. I was hoping for something stronger to link the women together. I sat back, crossing one leg over the other, ankle to knee, and sipped the hot tea. Fry brewed it strong, which was always welcome.
“Leila, you’re a young woman,” I said.
“Thanks for noticing, sir,” she drawled back.
“If you met a man a lot older than you, would you keep it from your family?”
She frowned. “How much older?”
“Twenty or so years.”
Fry whistled. “I’m not sure I would go out with someone that much older than me,” she answered, considering. “I suppose if I really liked him. But I’d tell my mum, I think. Not that she’d approve.”
That was what I was interested in. Why would Julia keep him from her family, from her sister? Because it was a delicate situation that she knew they might not approve of? Or had he asked to keep it a secret, the same way none of the other victim’s friends and family knew of any men in their lives?
A knock came at the door, and a PC popped their head in.
“Dr Crowe wants to see you, sir,” he said, vanishing a second later.
I sighed with relief. “God, let’s hope she has something good. Come on, Mills. See you in a bit, Fry.”
She gave me a jaunty salute, settling back down at her makeshift desk, rubbing her temple.
Mills and I strolled from the room and headed downstairs to Crowe’s lab. We passed Wasco on the way, his door open, studiously bent over a laptop with a heavy frown on his face. I did want an update on Julia’s laptop, but I’d wait for a better time. So, we walked on, knocking on the door of Crowe’s lab.
She opened it before I had time to lower my fist and ushered us in, looking fretful.
“Good news or bad news, Lena?” I asked as the three of us walked in and stood around the sheet-covered body on the table.
“Depends,” she replied, peeling the sheet back.
Julia Brook looked as peaceful on the cold table as she had in the moors, hair spilling behind her, eyes closed, restful. The blood had been cleaned from her body, the wounds stitched shut, so now she had a big angry line across her throat.
“Right,” Crowe said, “all the usual stuff out of the way. Cause of death, blood less. The wounds on her chest didn’t let out too much blood, so I’d say she was dead or close to it when he did those. The time of death is anywhere between four and five o’clock. She has some slight bruising on her arm, but it’s more or less faded, so I think he gripped her hard at one point.”
“Holding her still?” Mills asked.
“Or making her stay?” I suggested.
“Possibly both,” Crowe answered. She pulled the sheet further down to reveal the three stab wounds on Julia’s chest.
“Now, interesting. On the previous victims, these wounds were all slashes,” she demonstrated with her hand. “Fairly shallow cuts that were there for image more than anything, very minimal damage. But these, these were stabs. Straight down into the body, damaging the internal organs, then yanked out again. So, the wounds themselves aren’t as long, but a large knife would have likely been used.”
I nodded for her to carry on.
“That’s sort of the only difference,” she said, pulling the sheet back up. “We ran the contents of her stomach and lung, and as with the other four, no alcohol, no drunks, she was clean.” Crowe’s face fell a little now as she walked down to the end of the table.
My stomach dropped as she pulled the sheet up over Julia Brook’s feet.
It was there, on the top of her ankle, two little cuts. One straight, horizontal. The other diagonally beneath. A relatively meaningless symbol but one I knew all the same. The same mark that had been on the ankle of Olivia Barry and Minu Singh, Monika Borowiec and Clare Manston.
I lifted my free hand to my face, rubbing at my eyes.
It was him. He was back.
Mills looked questioningly to Crowe.
“The other four victims all had this mark,” she told him. “Same location, same shape.”
“We didn’t release it,” I added, my voice dark. “We didn’t release that information to the public.” I looked over at Crowe, and she met my gaze, her face a grimaced reflection of my own.
“It’s not quite the same,” she offered lightly. “The lines are wobbly, the cuts too deep again.”
“It’s been twenty years. I think we can allow some lack of practice,” I muttered, sitting down heavily on a chair and dropping my head.
Mills walked over quietly, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder.
“We can find him this time,” he promised.
“I should have found him last time,” I replied, squeezing my eyes shut against the guilt that rose up in me.
“Well, you didn’t,” Mills said simply, making me look up at him. His face was calm, as always, but there was a determined look in his eyes. “But this time, we will. You’re a better copper, you have me, and we have a name.”
“You have a name?” Crowe asked.
“I think we do,” I said, rising from the chair, giving Mills a grateful pat on the shoulder. “Thanks, Lena.”
She gave me a smile. “I’ll get the report up to you soon.”
I nodded and withdrew from the room. I stood in the cold, quiet corridor for a moment, gathering my thoughts. It wasn’t my fault, I told myself. It was his, of course. He was the one going around murdering people, not me. But I couldn’t shake that old guilt, not with Julia’s body lying one thin wall away.
“Bad time?
” a voice asked. I opened my eyes to find Harris looking at me.
“No,” I sighed. “What’s up?”
“I got word back from one of my informants,” she said. “He didn’t want to share much, naturally, but he said that the restaurant is worth watching.”
I scratched my chin. “I’m not sure there’s a link with us, though, Harris,” I admitted. “Looks like our killer’s back.”
Harris grimaced and swore lightly. “Sorry to hear that, Thatcher. Bear it in mind,” she said, handing me a thin paper folder. “Julia might not have been involved, but for all we know, it was her working there that painted her out as a target. Two crimes connected to one place? I don’t think the universe is really that funny.” She gave me a nod and turned to walk away.
“It might be worth looking into,” Mills suggested from over my shoulder.
I nodded. Harris did have a point, and something brought our killer back after all this time. Took him to that restaurant where he met Julia.
“Let me run past Sharp,” I said. “But I don’t think coincidences like these just drop out of the sky either,” I said.
Thirteen
Thatcher
Sharp wasn’t easily convinced today. I stood opposite her desk, waiting for her to respond after I filled her in on the restaurant and Harris’s update.
Her hands were pressed together under her chin, her eyes boring holes into my forehead.
“You think there’s a link?” She asked after a long, drawn-out silence, looking between myself and Mills, who was standing beside me, his hands in his pockets looking like a schoolboy being scolded by the head teacher.
“We think there might be, ma’am,” I replied. “At the very least, the fact that the killer has resurfaced and targeted a girl working at that restaurant specifically is interesting.”
“What does Sergeant Harris think?” She asked.
“She thinks that there’s something to it,” I said. “Either way, she’ll be looking into the restaurant.”
“If I may?” Fry piped up quietly from the chair in the corner. Sharp gave her a nod. “The name we’re looking into at the restaurant, Haspel, is always there around the same time as the reserved table. Either the day of or the day after. Since it’s a weekend, I didn’t think much of it, but now…” she trailed off with a slight shrug of her narrow shoulders. Sharp listened to her speak, then turned her gaze back to me.
“You want to act on this hunch, don’t you?”
“I do, ma’am.”
“Alright,” she said, slouching back. “But Mills and Fry will keep on investigating the homicide as they have been. We can’t afford to take our eye off the balls here, Thatcher, no matter how well I trust your judgement.”
“I understand, ma’am, thank you.”
She looked the three of us over again, then nodded and waved her hand, dismissing us from the room. We let Fry out first, then filed out together and walked quietly back to the office. I grabbed my phone from where it sat on my desk and fired a text to Harris asking her to join us.
“Let’s carry on our search for Dominic Haspel,” I said, sitting at my desk.
Fry nodded, taking her seat at the end. She’d made herself rather comfortable there, and it was strange to think she’d be back at her own desk soon. Mills was looking at my box of old case files, tapping the side.
“You must have had suspects,” he said after a pause.
“One or two,” I answered, “but none that connected all four of them. And I never thought the killings were completely random. Not with the effort put into them.”
“Any of them worth looking into now?”
“One or two might be,” I said, scratching my chin. “Harris might have heard of a few.”
“A few what?” she asked, striding into the room. “Hi, Leila.”
“Sergeant Harris.”
“A few what?” Tamara repeated, looking at me.
“Some of the suspects from the first killings,” I said. “You might have crossed paths.”
Harris hummed and dumped the armful of folders she was carrying onto Mills’s organised desk. He glanced at the new mess with a grimace, and Fry smiled sympathetically.
“I don’t remember the face and name of every druggie I run in with, Thatcher, but I appreciate your confidence.”
I grinned and turned to Mills. “Get the lady a chair, Isaac. We have work to do.”
He gave me a mocking salute and stepped out of the room, returning a moment later with a chair in tow that he propped at the end of his desk.
Harris grinned like a banshee and rubbed her hands together excitedly. “This will be good, boys. And Leila. Lovely to see you again, by the way. How’s Bean?”
“Sick,” Fry said with a grimace.
“You named your bloodhound Bean?” Mills asked from across the room.
“Yes.” Fry raised a dark eyebrow. “Problem?”
“No.”
“Are we finished?” I interrupted. “All reacquainted and all that?”
“It’s nice to check in with your friends,” Harris informed me.
“We have a murderer to catch,” I reminded them. “Let’s start with Haspel. Does the name mean anything to you, Harris?”
“Not off the top of my head,” she replied, “but I’ll take a look.” She sighed and grabbed some of her folders.
Mills’s phone dinged, and he glanced at the screen then up at me.
“Wasco. He’s in the laptop. I’ll go grab it,” he said, pushing up from the desk. I nodded, and he slipped out, leaving us in the quiet room.
I got started on Dominic Haspel, searching through our database first to see if there was any mention of him in the system, surprised that a result came up as quickly as it did. It was over forty years old, disapprovingly, and it was a juvenile record. A fifteen-year-old Dominic Haspel was arrested and charged for killing his neighbour’s cat, the neighbour beside the foster house he grew up in. I sighed. Difficult home life, violent behaviour, they were usually things we looked out for. There was nothing else on his record since then, so I broadened the search, and when the next results flicked onto the page, I groaned loudly.
“What is it, sir?” Fry called.
“He’s dead,” I snapped, sitting back and rubbing my face.
“Dead?” Harris asked.
“Dominic Haspel. He’s dead. Died years ago.” A string of curses ran through my head, and I dropped my face into my hands, trying to keep a lid on the temper that riled up. Sharp would not forgive me if I smashed the computer. Someone walked over to stand behind me, and I glanced to the side to see that Mills had returned, the laptop in his hand, a frown on his face.
“He’s dead?”
“Apparently so.”
Mills chewed his bottom lip, leaning closer to read the short eulogy the man had been given.
“He’s dead, but there’s still a Haspel knocking around? Did he have any kids or siblings?” Harris asked.
“None on record,” I sighed. “We’ve little on him, which is unsurprising, you know, since he’s dead.” I could hear the bitterness in my voice, sharply directed to the others, who didn’t deserve it.
Harris reached to the desk, grabbed another folder, and skimmed through it quickly. Then she rose and walked over, placing the open page in front of me.
“One of my informants, serving time at the moment, but back when we were staking out the restaurant, he was a help. He mentioned a man, Dom, who was mentioned by the others sometimes.”
“Mentioned by who?” I demanded.
She turned the page. “The names I gave you the other day, and a few more. Simon Marcell, Martin Klerk, Richard Medina, and Rebecca Medina.”
“Medina?” Fry asked, reaching for her own list. “There’s a Medina booked in the restaurant multiple times, Saturday’s.”
“Has there been any sign of them?” I asked.
“None that I’ve heard,” Harris said. “They slipped away about ten years ago.”
“
What about the others?”
“Simon Marcell is one of my informants,” Harris told us. “As for Klerk, I’ve never been able to find him. But apparently, they were all involved, to some extent. Not the big players, I always suspected they were the ones who went out into the countryside and recruited young lads.”
“And according to your informant,” I said, “they mentioned a man named Dom.”
“Once or twice, apparently, but he has no idea who Dom was or what he did.”
“You think it’s our Dom?” Mills asked, stepping back from my shoulder.
“Could be.” I drummed my fingers on the desk. “But why would he be working for the county lines gang?” I asked. “None of the other women was involved, were they?”
“He might have done other work for them,” Fry suggested, “not connected to the four women.”
“But they’d know his style,” Mills pointed out. “Which means they could replicate it if they wanted to.”
I nodded. “But why Julia? Why would they want to kill her?”
“Maybe she overheard something,” Mills suggested. “Figured out who they were and what they were up to, so they planted someone in the restaurant, used Dominic’s name, but spelt it wrong, and staged the murder to look like he did it.”
“It’s their style,” Harris said.
I thought it through, and it made sense. Julia made notes about them. She was a bright girl, and it wasn’t unthinkable that she’d put two and two together and end up as a target for it. If they’d worked with Dominic, they’d know his style and be able to replicate it to throw us off the mark, and there’d be no better place to do it than in the restraint, where they could keep tabs on her.
I stood up, pacing the room.
“Let’s look into the Medina’s,” I said, “see if there’s been any sign of them returning to the area, the other one too, Klerk. If they’re back in the city, then we could be onto something here. Is there anyone else we could look into as a suspect?”
“A few other small players from the old gang,” Harris said, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “But most of them moved on twenty years ago. It’s not likely that they’ll have stuck around here since then.”
Vicious Cycle (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 9) Page 11