Merciless: a gripping detective thriller (DI Kate Fletcher Book 2)

by Heleyne Hammersley

  Hopping down from the bed, Kate formed an idea of what had happened to Caroline. She’d come home at some point, cleaned the house and done some packing, obviously intending to leave. She must have taken some casual clothes and shoes with her and possibly a laptop. Was this part of a bigger plan? If so, Kate was struggling to make sense of it.

  If Caroline had murdered her father then handed herself in, there was no guarantee that she’d be released so quickly. Unless she’d done some research into ‘mercy killing’ cases. Most people were released fairly quickly after being questioned as they were deemed to be of no risk to the rest of society. Did Caroline Lambert know that? Probably, Kate thought. A woman as organised and controlled as the occupant of this house must be would have certainly done her research. But how did Maddie Cox fit in? What did she know that had led to her murder?

  Kate glanced around the room again. There would be no clues there. Caroline was too careful, too methodical. Disheartened, Kate decided to give the other upstairs rooms a cursory look and leave the team to complete a more thorough search.

  The third door off the landing led into a spartan guest room. The bed wasn’t made up and the pine wardrobe and bookshelf were empty. The room looked like a stage set – all surface with nothing beneath to give it character. A dark blue carpet still showed the marks of the vacuum cleaner and the bedside table held a lamp and a coaster for a mug or glass. The curtains hung symmetrically and the windows looked recently cleaned. Nothing unusual. Nothing incriminating.

  The bathroom was as spotless as Kate had expected. On the windowsill was an assortment of toiletries but no toothpaste. An electric toothbrush sat on its holder on top of a small medicine cabinet, the cable hanging down the side. Caroline had obviously not wanted to leave it plugged in and risk a fire. The laundry basket under the sink contained a blouse, a bra and two pairs of knickers. A grey towel was folded neatly on the towel rail and the bath mat hung over the side of the bath. Kate peered round the shower curtain and saw shower gel hanging from the soap holder, which was empty and clean.

  The door to the final bedroom was slightly ajar, not fully closed as the others had been. Kate reached out her hand and gave it a slight push. It swung open easily, not obstructed by thick carpet or wayward furniture. As the light fell on the walls of the tiny room, Kate gasped. This wasn’t what she’d been expecting to find in such an orderly house.

  26

  ‘Hollis! Get up here, now!’ Kate yelled. She heard the stomp of his size tens on the stairs and then he was behind her, staring over her shoulder.

  ‘What the…?’

  ‘I know. Not quite what I was expecting, either.’

  She took a step into the room, desperately trying to make sense of what she was seeing but it was so unexpected that her brain couldn’t quite process the information; it looked like the bedroom of a typical teenage girl, with flowery wallpaper and posters adorning the walls.

  ‘I thought she didn’t have kids,’ Hollis said.

  ‘I don’t think this is a kid’s bedroom,’ Kate responded, taking in the detail on the posters and the garish colour scheme. ‘I think it’s a shrine. Look at the posters.’

  A film poster for Pretty in Pink showed Molly Ringwald glaring down at the room from the head of the bed. Madonna and George Michael competed for pride of place on the wall opposite and David Bowie guarded the wardrobe door. The single bed was made up with sheets, blankets and a faded, pink candlewick bedspread, folded back invitingly to reveal a pillow that held the indentation of a head.

  ‘Do you think she slept in here?’ Hollis asked, his voice reduced to a whisper as though he were in church. Kate pulled open the wardrobe, ignoring Bowie’s invitation to dance, and scanned the shelves and rail. Empty. She crossed the room to the rickety-looking chest of drawers and pulled out the top one. Nothing.

  ‘Hard to tell,’ she said to Hollis. ‘If not, then why has she decorated it like this? It looks like my room from the eighties.’

  Hollis sniggered. ‘Really? I would have had you down as more the Bauhaus and Toyah type.’

  Kate smiled at him. ‘Nope. Wham and Spandau all the way.’

  She stood in the middle of the carpet and looked around, trying to feel the full effect of the décor. It looked authentic, exactly as if she’d stepped back in time to her own teenage years. She even recognised the Bananarama poster as one that she’d cut out of Jackie magazine and put on her own wall, and a poster for The Breakfast Club was identical to one that had belonged to one of her sixth-form friends.

  ‘This is really weird,’ she said to Hollis, who was taking pictures. ‘Even the wallpaper looks like it’s from the eighties.’

  ‘Maybe the previous owners decorated thirty years ago and left it when they moved out. Caroline could have kept it as a joke and then added the other stuff. It probably reminds her of when she was younger.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Kate said. ‘The Breakfast Club came out after we’d moved to Nottingham so it must have been eighty-five or eighty-six. Same for Pretty in Pink, I think. Caroline would have only been eight or nine. She must have had sophisticated tastes if this is a replica of her bedroom.’

  ‘Her sister went missing in eighty-six,’ Hollis said, still staring at the posters.

  Suddenly her use of the word ‘shrine’ made more sense. This wasn’t Caroline’s bedroom; it was Jeanette’s. Everything in it screamed fifteen-year-old girl. She took a closer look at the Bananarama poster, taking in the detail of the corners and the barely discernible fold through the middle. Brown lines indicated where the staples from the magazine had held the poster in the middle pages. The corners were dog-eared and one was slightly torn as though it had been ripped down in a hurry and not handled with any great care.

  The film posters were glossy but the edges had lost their shine and, again, the corners bulged slightly. Perhaps they’d once been hung with huge pieces of Blu Tack rather than the drawing pins that held them in their current positions.

  ‘These are genuine; look at how the edges are browning.’

  Hollis took a step inside the room and peered at David Bowie. ‘These are over thirty years old? They’re in bloody good condition considering they’re not much younger than me.’

  ‘They’ve been treasured,’ Kate said. ‘Caroline must have been looking after these for years. I think they were her sister’s. In fact, I think this was her sister’s bedroom. Not in this house, obviously, but in Dennis’s house. I bet she kept this stuff safe until she had a chance to recreate Jeanette’s room.’

  ‘Creepy,’ Hollis muttered.

  ‘Maybe,’ Kate agreed. ‘Maybe she never really got over the loss of her sister; wanted to keep her alive in some way.’

  ‘Alive? She was never found. We don’t know that she’s dead. She could have just run away and grown up in a different part of the country.’

  ‘She’s dead, Dan,’ Kate said with certainty. ‘I can’t believe that she’d stay away from her family for so long. Maybe not her parents, but her little sister? Surely she’d have come forward by now.’

  The room was giving her the creeps. It was so much like her own bedroom in Thorpe that she half expected to hear her dad shout her down for her tea or her sister, Karen to come barging in to tell her the latest in one of her many friendship sagas.

  ‘You okay,’ Hollis asked, frowning with concern. ‘You look miles away.’

  ‘This room brings back a lot of memories, that’s all. Wouldn’t want to be that age again.’ She took a last look around and then went back to the room that Caroline appeared to have been using as a study, with Hollis following close behind. He really did seem to be unsettled by the strange bedroom.

  She took her phone out of her pocket and rang Cooper’s line at Doncaster Central.

  ‘Cooper. Did you get the file on Jeanette’s disappearance?’ Kate asked, aware that she had used none of the usual pleasantries associated with a phone call. Cooper answered in the affirmative.

  ‘Good. I want you to
sort through it and give me the details: times, witnesses, statements and details of the police search. If you can also have a look at the newspaper reports that would be really helpful – I want to know what theories there were about this girl’s disappearance.’

  Kate was just sliding her phone into her pocket when it rang. Cooper.

  ‘That was quick,’ Kate joked.

  ‘No I…’ Cooper started then stopped, clearly realising that Kate wasn’t serious. ‘We’ve just had a call from East Yorkshire, went straight through to Raymond who told me to ring you back.’

  ‘Get on with it,’ Kate urged through gritted teeth. Cooper was great with computers but she could take an age to explain something.

  ‘They’ve found Caroline Lambert’s car.’

  ‘Where?’ Kate asked, feeling her pulse rate increase. Finally they seemed to have got a break. She just prayed that it wasn’t in an airport car park or at the ferry terminal near Newcastle.

  ‘Flamborough,’ Cooper said, her tone almost apologetic. ‘It was parked in the car park next to the cliffs at Flamborough Head. It’s locked.’

  ‘Right. Get onto whoever called it in and make sure that nobody touches that car until I get there.’

  Cooper hung up.

  ‘Not good news,’ Kate said to Hollis. ‘Caroline’s car’s been found near Flamborough Head.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ Hollis asked.

  ‘East coast. Near Bridlington,’ Kate explained. ‘It’s popular with bird watchers and suicides.’

  27

  It was getting dark when Hollis pulled the car onto Lighthouse Road in Flamborough. They’d continued to speculate about Jeanette Lambert’s whereabouts on the drive but neither had come up with a plausible theory. Hollis remained convinced that the girl had either run away or been abducted and killed and that whoever had done it had found a really good hiding place for the body.

  ‘Do you think, between us, we could write a compelling drama for the BBC?’ Hollis joked. ‘We’ve got some amazing ideas for a plot.’ He flicked on the windscreen wipers as a light drizzle obscured his view.

  ‘I think I’ve lived through enough drama, thanks,’ Kate responded, thinking about the previous summer. ‘This weather’s grim. Are we nearly there?’

  Hollis checked the screen on the satnav. The red line showed that they were less than half a mile from their destination.

  ‘Five minutes and we should see the lighthouse. Hang on.’ He peered out of the side window, looking across Kate. ‘The lighthouse is in the wrong place.’

  Kate followed his gaze and saw a tall, pale tower which looked like it had been plonked in the middle of the green of a golf course. She remembered asking her dad, on a family outing to this part of the coast when she was about six, why the lighthouse had been placed on a golf course. He’d laughingly explained that in the 1600s, when the lighthouse had been built, the coast had looked different and that it would have been even further inland than it was now. But the golf course wouldn’t have been there.

  ‘That’s not it,’ she said. ‘That’s the old one. The new one’s further along on the cliffs. Keep going.’

  Hollis followed her instructions and they pulled into a car park next to the newer lighthouse where Caroline Lambert’s car was cordoned off with cones and police tape. Two uniformed officers were huddled next to the whitewashed wall which ran round the lighthouse, obviously trying to keep out of the biting wind.

  As Kate got out of the car, the door of a dark saloon car two parking spaces away opened and a tall figure stepped out.

  ‘DI Fletcher?’ he asked, extending a hand hidden in a leather glove.

  Kate confirmed her identity and shook hands, faintly repulsed by the cold surface of the glove.

  ‘DS Morrison,’ the man said. ‘East Yorkshire police. I’ve been waiting for you.’

  He was wearing a long, dark, wool coat and his chin nestled in an expensive-looking grey scarf. His dark hair and eyes and sharp nose contributed to the impression that he could be a mafia boss. Kate noted that he hadn’t allowed the two other policemen to shelter in his car and wondered if he was one of those detectives who didn’t like to mix with the ‘lower ranks’.

  She introduced Hollis, and Morrison escorted them both to Caroline Lambert’s car. It was a dark blue BMW 5 series with a two-year-old registration plate.

  ‘Expensive,’ Hollis mused. ‘Wouldn’t want to leave it unattended in the back of beyond for long.’

  Kate saw Morrison’s back stiffen slightly at the ‘back of beyond’ comment but he obviously chose to ignore it.

  ‘One of the uniformed officers noticed the car during a routine sweep of the car park,’ he said. ‘It’s parked in one of the spaces reserved for the lighthouse staff and he didn’t recognise it. We tend to know who’s who in the back of beyond and this car doesn’t belong to any of the regular staff – our man would have recognised it otherwise. When he did a PNC check the number came back as of interest so he rang it in and one of my colleagues called Doncaster. We were told to leave it alone until somebody from South Yorkshire got here. Now you’re here, can you tell me what it’s all about?’

  ‘The owner of the car is of interest in two murder cases,’ Hollis said in a tone that sounded a bit self-important to Kate’s ears. She hoped that the two men weren’t going to get into some sort of territorial pissing contest before they’d even had a look at the car.

  ‘She’s connected with two recent suspicious deaths and appears to have done a runner,’ Kate said, trying to placate Morrison with information. ‘My current concern is that she’s driven here to kill herself.’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Morrison conceded. ‘We do get a fair bit of that off the cliffs. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called to attend reports of a jumper.’

  He glanced at Hollis as he said the last word as though it was a challenge to Hollis’s credentials as a detective.

  Kate sighed inwardly. She hated it when colleagues judged themselves and each other on the number and condition of deaths they had attended, and she prayed that Hollis wouldn’t rise to the bait.

  ‘Never seen one,’ Hollis said amiably. ‘I’m sure it’s not pleasant.’

  Morrison sniggered. ‘Not pleasant? Can you imagine what falling nearly four hundred feet onto rocks does to a body? It’s better when they choose a high tide and get washed out to sea. At least that way we don’t have to scrape them up into a bag.’

  ‘Fascinating as this is,’ Kate said, hoping her tone conveyed exactly the opposite sentiment, ‘I’d like to get a look at the car before we lose the light completely. I notice there’s not a SOCO team on site yet.’

  ‘They’re on their way,’ Morrison said. ‘I gave it a couple of hours so that they’d be here around the same time as you. Not sure what the point is, though. All you’ll get are the driver’s prints and trace from her house. It’s not like somebody kidnapped her and pushed her off the cliffs.’

  Kate was struggling to hide her annoyance at Morrison’s smug attitude and sloppy police work. He was probably right but, if there was an outside chance that there was evidence in the car linking Caroline to Maddie Cox, or anything that would shed light on the relationship with her father, then they needed to know. She stepped closer to the car and tried to peer into the driver’s side window but the last rays of the setting sun were making it difficult to make out the interior. She walked round to the other side where the light was actually helpful and was surprised to see an envelope on the passenger seat.

  ‘Not uncommon,’ Morrison said when Kate pointed it out to him. ‘A lot of jumpers like to leave a final farewell.’

  She was prevented from berating Morrison for his lack of empathy by headlights on the lane leading to the car park.

  A few seconds later, a van pulled in next to Kate’s car and three figures got out.

  ‘Right. Looks like you’ve got your SOCO team,’ Morrison said, stuffing his hands into his pockets. ‘It’s past time I knocked
off for the day, and I don’t think you’ll need me for this bit.’

  ‘What about a dive team?’ Kate asked, determined not to allow him to simply slope off home, or to the pub or wherever he might want to go. ‘Surely you’ve contacted the coastguard?’

  Morrison sighed and stared at her as if she were an infant who was having difficulty grasping a simple concept.

  ‘If she went off at high tide, a dive team won’t find her. There’s nothing on the rocks – Laurel and Hardy over there have already had a walk along the coast to have a look.’ He inclined his head towards the uniformed officers. ‘She might wash up in a few days, she might not. Depends what time she went in the sea.’

  He turned away and started walking back to his car.

  ‘CCTV,’ Kate called after him. ‘I’ll need CCTV for the car park. There’s a camera at the entrance. It’ll confirm what time she arrived. Could you sort that out for me, please? You’ll know who to contact, I’m sure.’

  She turned back to the suited figures surrounding Caroline Lambert’s car and heard Hollis snigger.

  ‘Nice one,’ he whispered.

  ‘Can’t stand arrogant, lazy coppers,’ Kate said. ‘And well done for not getting into a pissing contest with him.’

  ‘Not worth it,’ Hollis said. ‘He outranks me.’

  ‘For now. You might want to think about doing something about that. Get your sergeant’s exams done?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Hollis muttered, walking away from her so that he could watch the forensics team from a better angle.

  Kate was surprised. He was a good DC, keen but measured in his approach, and he was good with people. He’d make an excellent sergeant but he’d never shown much interest in promotion. A summons from the car interrupted her train of thought.

  ‘We’re in,’ one of the white-suited figures said. Kate strode over and peered at the interior of the BMW. Like Caroline’s house, it was spotless. Kate prayed that it hadn’t had a quick valet since Maddie Cox’s murder.