Dark Skies: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 7)

by LJ Ross

  As the sun set for another day, it left a canvas of pink and red clouds melting into one another in shades of scarlet and cerise. As a prelude to the dawn, it was spectacular.

  “My granny used to say, ‘Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,’ ” Yates remarked. “Or was it, ‘shepherd’s’?”

  “Either way, it means another day has nearly come and gone,” Ryan said. “I’ve just had Morrison on the phone. I don’t know if you caught the news?”

  Their awkward faces told him the answer.

  “Yeah, well, once again, we’re to blame for all society’s problems unless we bring this home soon. I’ve organised a town meeting for seven-thirty and I know we’d all much rather be doing other things but I want to show a united front.”

  There were nods around the room.

  “Good. We couldn’t hope to keep this investigation out of the public eye for long but it bears repeating that under no circumstances should any of you talk to the press or even the general public about matters pertaining to the investigation.”

  Phillips grunted.

  “Have somebody’s lips been flapping?”

  “It’s possible, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we’re making progress to find this arsehole. Tell me some good news, Frank.”

  Phillips pursed his lips.

  “I don’t know if I’d say it was good news but, as of around four o’clock, we’ve now collected DNA swabs from everyone on our list of residents whose whereabouts couldn’t be accounted for when Guy Sullivan died. Every one of them, including Craig Hunter, agreed to provide a sample except for Nathan Armstrong.”

  “The writer guy?” Ryan thought back to his conversation the previous day with Kate Robson, who said he liked to have an early riding lesson on Saturdays. “Is he alibied?”

  “He says he has CCTV from his property that shows he never left the house, but we haven’t verified that yet.”

  “And he refused to give a sample?”

  “Point blank,” Phillips said. “Looked me dead in the eye and told me we’d have to go after a court order if we wanted it.”

  Ryan leaned back against his desk and folded his arms across his chest.

  “Interesting,” he said. “I wonder why he’s so precious about it?”

  “That’s exactly what we wondered, so I took the liberty of running a quick background check on Mr Armstrong. Sadly, he’s a law-abiding citizen with nothing more than a pop for speeding a couple of years ago.”

  “Disappointing,” Ryan agreed, without any irony. “Let’s shelve him for now and turn to Craig Hunter. I’m shocked he agreed to provide a sample.”

  Phillips linked his fingers across his paunch.

  “You and me both, son. That’s why I took another liberty and asked Faulkner to expedite the testing of his sample when we sent it through.”

  Ryan’s ears pricked up.

  “And?”

  “It’s negative,” Phillips said, and Ryan felt his stomach plummet. If ever a man looked the type to kill and maim, it was Craig Hunter, but it turned out there was no forensic evidence against him.

  “What about previous convictions?”

  Phillips shook his head.

  “Craig Hunter is clean as a whistle,” he replied. “Of course, some might say, too clean.”

  Ryan smiled slowly.

  “There’s no record?”

  “Bingo,” Phillips said. “There isn’t so much as a permanent address listed for Craig Hunter and the bloke’s already told us he works mostly cash-in-hand. Could be he’s living off the grid.”

  Ryan nodded and turned to Yates.

  “Mel? I want you to dig up whatever you can on Craig Hunter. He might not be connected to Guy Sullivan but…” Ryan gave a self-effacing shrug. “Hell, something just feels off. We can’t store his DNA but I want you to run it through the system for possible matches. Do it now, please. You never know what skeletons might be rattling in Mr Hunter’s wardrobe.”

  Yates nodded and moved to the back of the room, where she pulled up a chair and began to enter the data onto the system for a full check.

  Ryan turned back to Phillips.

  “If not Craig Hunter, who are we looking for? Has Faulkner been able to narrow down the search from the hair sample?”

  “Ask him yourself,” Phillips said, as Faulkner shouldered through the door looking like an Arctic explorer. His hair stuck out at odd angles, whether as a product of restless fingers or because of the blustery wind buffeting outside. His feet were encased in heavy-duty walking boots which shook the floor as he tramped across the room and he wore thick all-weather gloves that doubled the size of his actual handspan.

  “Perfect timing,” Ryan told him.

  Faulkner threw off his heavy winter coat to reveal waterproof khakis, a fleece and a clipboard

  “Trainspotters Anonymous is down the hall,” Phillips joked.

  “Ha bloody ha,” Faulkner said. “I happen to be well versed in the ways of country life and I know it’s better to come prepared for the worst.”

  “Still seein’ that gardener lass, then?” Phillips enquired, before popping a stick of chewing gum into his mouth.

  Faulkner shuffled in his seat but couldn’t quite hide the grin.

  “We went out for a walk along Hadrian’s Wall last weekend,” he admitted.

  “Y’ old hound dawg,” Phillips hooted. “Hope you took her out for dinner afterwards. It’s awful hungry work, hiking up those hills.”

  The last statement was followed by a suggestive wriggle of his bushy eyebrows while Faulkner made a show of taking off and folding his gloves.

  “Ah, I’m working up to the full three-course meal.”

  “Good lad.”

  Ryan waited until their exchange wound up before bringing the conversation back to the point.

  “Much as we’re interested in your love life, Tom, what we really want to know is what you can tell us about the hair you found on Guy Sullivan’s body. Phillips tells us there’s no match with Craig Hunter.”

  Faulkner nodded.

  “He’s right. There’s no match with Craig Hunter, or any man, in fact.”

  Ryan’s brow furrowed.

  “You mean the hair belongs to a woman?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How sure can you be?”

  Faulkner shoved his glasses further up his nose, to give himself a second to think about it.

  “I’m never going to be able to say I’m 100% sure on any of the work that we do,” he said, fairly. “The unique DNA found on this strand of hair didn’t flag on any of our systems, so I can tell you I’m fairly certain it’s new on our radar. The hair sample was contaminated with blood and other bodily fluids, but we isolated those belonging to the victim and separated them from the alien hair follicle. After that, we try to narrow down the search by identifying gender, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. We look at the sex chromosome to see if there are two X chromosomes which would signify female but, to do that, we test for a negative. In other words, we tested for the presence of a Y-chromosome and as there wasn’t one present, we have to assume the hair follicle belonged to a female.”

  Faulkner paused to rub his eyes. It had been a long day at the lab and he was starting to feel the effects of staring through a microscope for several hours at a time.

  “There is always a margin of error,” he admitted. “But I’m as sure as I can be. You need to look for a woman. I’ve got technicians working around the clock to process the samples sent through today and we should be in a position to rule out the students—”

  Just then, his mobile began to shrill out a tinny rendition of Smooth Criminal.

  “That’s the lab,” he muttered, and hurried from the room to take the call.

  “While Faulkner’s dealing with that, where are we at with the traffic cordons?”

  Ryan turned to the local police sergeant, who gave him a rundown. All cars entering and leaving the checkpoints set up around the forest had
been noted, including registration plates and times of entry or exit.

  “Thanks. In light of what Faulkner’s told us, do we have any women on the list of residents whose whereabouts are unaccounted for?”

  Phillips opened his mouth to answer but swallowed his words as Faulkner walked back into the room looking thoroughly dejected.

  Ryan noticed the man’s facial expression immediately.

  “Spit it out, Tom.”

  Faulkner gave him an apologetic look.

  “We’ve found a match.”

  “But—”

  Faulkner shook his head.

  “The hair follicle belongs to Isabella Lombardo, one of Guy Sullivan’s fellow students.”

  “And she’s fully alibied,” Phillips threw in.

  Ryan said nothing but wished he could kick something. Hard.

  Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose and then stalked over to the murder board to look at the victims’ faces. It was an odd thing, but their faces gave him the strength to carry on regardless.

  “So our star piece of forensic evidence ain’t so hot, after all,” he said to the room at large. “Luckily, I like a challenge. Faulkner? What else have you got for me?”

  “We’re still analysing most of the samples we took—we’re working flat out—but some initial findings have come back from the murder weapon. The rock we found not far from the body was covered in Sullivan’s brain matter but we also found some tiny leather fibres. Best guess would be that our killer wore gloves. Brown ones,” he added.

  “And the tracks?”

  “You’re looking for a shoe size somewhere between a seven and a ten, although the imprints suggest a tracked sole that could denote a running shoe, a wellington boot or some other kind of boot. In that case, people sometimes buy a size bigger.”

  Ryan almost laughed.

  “So, you’re telling me our perp is either a woman with an above-average shoe size or a man with a small-to-average shoe size?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Ryan ran a frustrated hand through his hair and thought of how he would tell the local population and regional press that they had absolutely no new leads. That was bound to inspire faith in their profession, he thought caustically.

  He turned back to the room and looked around the faces of the police staff who waited for his next instruction.

  “Alright, this is what we’re going to do. Nobody has forgotten about Duncan Gray but, for the present, we need to prioritise finding Guy Sullivan’s killer who may still be active. That won’t wash well with the press, but we don’t have another twenty pairs of hands and I can’t pull any more money out of my arse,” he said, eloquently. “We’re stretched to the limit as it is, so, without a sample to work from, the DNA testing isn’t strictly necessary any more. Let’s keep the samples in storage until the end of the investigation, okay Tom?”

  “Understood,” he said. “That’ll free up time to work on the trace evidence we found at the crime scene.”

  “Good. Let me know if anything new turns up. Phillips? I want every witness re-interviewed and deep background checks on every person in the vicinity—not just those within a five-mile radius and not just those without an alibi. Somebody could be covering for them and we need to flush them out.”

  Having completed the processes for entering Craig Hunter’s DNA onto the mainframe to see if there was a match with any unsolved crimes, Yates resumed her seat at the front of the room.

  “Sir? Are we expanding the net?”

  “Damn right we are, Yates. Get ready to go fishing in a bloody big pond.”

  CHAPTER 20

  At precisely the same moment MacKenzie reached for the bottle of chilled white wine sitting lonely in her fridge, an automated e-mail pinged on her smartphone. After returning from a very enjoyable day out with her friend, she had been toying with the idea of treating herself to a quiet night in with a good book until Frank came home.

  But it was not to be.

  She brought up the e-mail and read its contents, then re-read it a second time in case her eyes were deceiving her.

  A match.

  All thoughts of books and pyjamas disappeared as she grabbed her coat and scurried back to her car. There would be nobody in the office from the Cold Cases Team; they worked sociable, nine-to-five hours and the recent lack of new leads had lulled them into a state of apathy. But if the automated e-mail was correct, MacKenzie was about to shake them out of their self-imposed stupor with a vengeance.

  Twenty minutes later, she burst through the main doors of Police Headquarters with barely an acknowledgement for the duty sergeant who was dealing with the usual motley assortment of D&Ds, assaults and mobile phone thefts that defined a regular Sunday evening. Motion-activated lighting flickered on as she made her way down the central corridor towards her office and MacKenzie threw her bag on the floor in her haste to fire up the computer.

  “Come on, come on,” she muttered, never having felt so impatient in her life.

  Finally, the system fluttered into life and she brought up the internal database to see whose name had flagged as a match for two of the six priority cold cases she’d identified the previous day, as well as five or six more possible victims that were linked by similar MO.

  MacKenzie’s heart hammered as she clicked through the necessary steps until she was presented with a name.

  Craig Hunter.

  But it wasn’t that which made MacKenzie’s eyes widen.

  It was the name of the police officer who had entered his DNA onto the system, less than an hour ago.

  Police Constable Melanie Yates, CID.

  “Bingo,” she breathed, and scrambled for her phone to put an urgent call through to her colleague.

  * * *

  Kielder Castle was a stately eighteenth-century former hunting lodge of the Duke of Northumberland which housed permanent exhibitions about the forest, birds and night sky for the benefit of visitors to the region from its central position in the middle of Kielder Village. The building sat atop an ancient burial ground dating back to 3000 BC and, to take advantage of such marvellous good fortune, the castle also ran ghost hunts where tourists could stay overnight and frighten themselves with the prospect of meeting a malevolent spirit. But as the sun slipped away and blood-red uplighters illuminated the castle walls, the crowds gathered to hear about another kind of malevolent force, one that was still very much alive.

  Ryan stood inside the main exhibition space on a hastily-erected platform so that he might be seen and heard by the people who turned out. At best, he had anticipated fifty or sixty residents, but as the clock struck seven-thirty he estimated over a hundred and fifty people were in attendance, not including the row of journalists he recognised by sight. Standing beside him, Mitch Fenwick had left behind his usual cut-off shorts and bright blue work jacket in favour of a more serious uniform of grey suit and matching tie.

  “Nearly there, I reckon,” he murmured to Ryan. “Shall we get started?”

  Ryan glanced over his shoulder to check his team were in place.

  “We’re ready,” he said.

  Fenwick stepped up to a microphone and tapped it with one broad finger, which resounded around the speaker system with a loud, electronic whine.

  “Sorry folks, let me just fiddle with the volume… Okay, that’s better.” He gave them all a friendly smile and launched into an eloquent introduction that had Ryan swiftly re-evaluating the man.

  While Fenwick spoke of the recent tragedies and thanked the police, forestry workers and other volunteers for their swift action, Ryan studied the faces of those who had arrived early enough to grab a front-row seat. The primary function of the meeting was to satisfy his Chief Constable, the local press and residents who may be living in fear, but there was an additional advantage to events such as these. It enabled Ryan to take note of those who turned up to bask in the spotlight or, conversely, those who took pains to avoid it. It was a well-established tenet of criminal psychology tha
t killers could seldom resist the lure of their own crimes. Often, they returned to the scene of their crime, came along to press briefings or purported to help the police in other ways, to remain connected with their act of violence and continue to draw pleasure from it. And so, Ryan studied the faces looking up at him, taking a mental snapshot of the audience.

  At the front of the room, journalists sat with hand-held tape recorders and notepads balanced precariously on their knees while their cameramen stood at the sides capturing every word on film. In the second row, Ryan spotted Angela Gray beside another woman of the same age who might have been her sister or a friend. A little further along, Freddie Milburn was seated amongst a crowd of locals. There were more faces Ryan didn’t recognise but assumed belonged to the wider local population and he spotted Michaela Collingwood near the back of the room standing next to Anna, who gave him a knowing smile as his eyes tracked over her face and their eyes locked.

  At the very end of the row, Nathan Armstrong stood with a takeaway coffee cup in his hand talking to another one of the locals. Just before Ryan was called forward to the mic, Kate Robson let herself into the room and managed to find a perch at the back.

  Craig Hunter was nowhere to be seen.

  “…I’ll hand over to Detective Chief Inspector Ryan, who is going to give us an update on the investigation and, hopefully, put our minds at rest.”

  Ryan took a step forward but was diverted by the sound of Yates’ mobile phone ringing loudly somewhere over his left shoulder and she fumbled to turn it off, blushing furiously until the sound cut out.

  “Sorry,” she mouthed.

  The look of mortification on her face was so priceless, he almost laughed. Instead, he turned to face the crowd with an air of authority, eyes narrowing in the glare of four or five bright camera lights.

  “Thank you to Councillor Fenwick for his introduction and for arranging this meeting at such short notice,” Ryan began. “I’m grateful to all of you for your attendance and for your patience and support during our investigation, which remains ongoing.”

  He cast calm grey eyes around the room, making as many personal connections as possible in the circumstances.