‘I need their flat, the furniture workshop and Colylwell’s office searched now,’ she called out to Murray. ‘We have to assume they know we’re onto them. I’m quite sure the parents have tried to contact them. For all we know the reason we can’t find them at the moment is that they’re in the process of another killing. Either that or the parents have told them to run.’ She passed the paper to Murray and watched him as he skimmed down the list. He raised his head and looked at her.
‘You saw the name, mam?’
‘James Guy? Yes.’
‘I suppose we’ll need to contact all of these people. Organise an Osman Warning Letter to inform them that their lives may be in danger.’
‘Yes, you’d better get someone on to that. We need to find them, Alan, before anyone else dies.’
‘Are you any clearer on a motive, Tara?’ Tweedy asked.
‘Not entirely, sir. We still have to confirm that the Collywell brother and sister are the children of Kelly Pritchard. If they are then they must have a reason for killing past members of the Vera Deitate church. That includes Dinsdale Kirkman, Maurice Young and Angela Sanders. So far we have no reason to believe that Derek Greasby was connected to Vera Deitate. I can only think their motive is connected to the death of their mother.’
Tara couldn’t help her unease at the thought that the longer they remained untraceable the more likely it was that the Collywells were engaged in another killing. But against whom? Was Jason Collywell simply working from his list of charges or were all of their victims firmly connected to the time of his mother’s death?
When neither sibling could be found at their place of work or at their flat, Tara and Murray seized the opportunity to have a look inside each location.
The furniture workshop gave no real clues that it had been used for murder except that here lay the means to construct the circular wooden frames upon which each victim, apart from Angela Sanders, had been nailed. She reckoned that forensics would be able to come up with such evidence perhaps by comparing the various woods used on the premises, the tools and the company van, if there was one. The computer used by Jemima Collywell was taken away, Tara wondering what gruesome secrets were stored upon it.
With the search ongoing at Oak-bespoke, they rushed to the South Liverpool Probation Office at the end of Falkner Street, close to the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. The modern low-rise office building had already closed for the evening, but a keyholder had been summoned to the premises. Tara and Murray were directed to the office used by Jason Collywell. His computer terminal had already been removed and any locked drawers and filing cabinets had been opened. There was little to be seen at first glance to indicate that Collywell was anything but a professional employee of the Probation Service. Murray studied the collection of pictures of various Liverpool squads over the years that hung on the wall behind Collywell’s desk. One dated back to the eighties showing the likes of Dalglish, Hansen and Grobbelaar. Tara examined the desk, free of files or clutter in keeping with the Service’s clear desk policy. In the lockable drawers anything of a personal nature, correspondence etc., identified only Jason Collywell and not a man named Corey. Lying at the bottom of one nearly empty drawer she found two photographs. One showed Jemima Collywell in a bikini, one hand on hip, and clearly somewhere on a sunshine holiday. The other showed a landscape of open fields and hedgerows. It was not an expertly taken shot, a telegraph pole ran down the centre of the picture and it was a dull, cloudy day. She didn’t immediately recognise the place, but after gazing for a while she decided that it resembled the area close to the Vera Deitate farmhouse. The house itself was not visible. She already knew it could not be seen from the road. It was the closest thing she’d uncovered so far to link Collywell with the killings.
‘I don’t think we’ll find anything obvious here,’ she said to Murray, who had begun to skim through a drawer in one of the two filing cabinets.
‘Yeah, it’ll take days to go through all these records.’
‘And we don’t have days. I can’t help thinking the pair of them are up to something this evening.’
Murray drove them to the apartment shared by brother and sister. It was a ground floor flat of an Edwardian block on the A561, south of the city in Cressington, ironically not that far from the home of Janet Malcroft and from that of the deceased Dinsdale Kirkman. The apartment occupied the entire ground floor, access to the flat above was by a separate outdoor entrance. The sitting room was spacious, minimalistic, with bookcases surrounding two large sofas arranged at a right angle to each other. A gas burner was set into the original fireplace, a coffee table sitting in front with a couple of furniture trade magazines lying on top.
The kitchen was very modern with expensive-looking fittings and a coffee machine sat on one of the benches. There was nothing in either of these rooms to indicate that the occupants were murderers or that murders were planned here. Tara left Murray, who was going through the collection of books, shaking each one in the hope that something incriminating would drop to the floor. She had a cursory look in the bathroom and the smaller of the two bedrooms. Curiously, she couldn’t decide which of the siblings slept there. The room was clinically clean, a bed with a plain white duvet, a bedside table and a small wardrobe which, Tara guessed, had been made at Oak-bespoke. Inside it she found some male clothes, trousers, shirts and ties. A cardboard box sat at the bottom. She pulled it out and opened up the flaps. There was a pile of papers and photographs inside, and as she leafed through them she soon became completely certain that not only were the Collywells the killers but that they were the children of Kelly Pritchard. She gazed at family pictures, in happier times she assumed, of Kelly with her children and Keron Fogge, a long-haired and bearded man, a throwback to the hippies of the sixties. There were a couple of pictures of the kids with their grandparents Norman and Molly Pritchard. Happier times indeed with Molly smiling, full of health and vitality.
She moved on to what was the master bedroom, quite spacious and with a bay window overlooking a long and narrow garden. A strange feeling arose in her as she looked around. There was no definitive stamp upon this space. She couldn’t say for sure that this was the room used exclusively by either Jemima or Jason. The cream colour scheme wasn’t particularly feminine, neither was it masculine. Clothes within the built-in wardrobes seemed to belong to both brother and sister. Grooming products, fragrances, makeup and aftershaves all sat upon the dressing table and, gazing at the king-size bed, she wondered for a second if it were shared. Standing on a bedside table to the left-hand side was an old-looking rag doll. An embroidered face with black pigtails. The green flowery dress it wore had the name Jemima crudely written in felt pen across it and now faded. Turning it over, the name Kelly had been stitched into the material of the dress. On the opposite bedside table sat a large Bible. It was huge, a lectern-style volume, King James version as opposed to a modern translation, a sturdy cover of brown leather, mottled with age, with brass clasps and a reinforced spine. Tara opened it at a place where there was a leather bookmark inside. She should have guessed. The Book of Proverbs. Verse 12 of chapter 14 had been underlined in red pen.
‘There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.’
She wondered if the verses had been chosen specifically for each victim, or had there been a progression either through the Book of Proverbs or in the motives of the Collywells. From what Tweedy had told her about Solomon being the writer of this book, his use of pentagrams, his wisdom, his sense of justice, had these children of Kelly Pritchard, no matter how bizarre it appeared, set out to better the world, to dispense justice to wrong-doers? A justice not available to police forces and not condoned by normal society?
She had all the proof she needed to confirm most of her thinking, but of greater urgency was finding out where this pair of killers performed their deeds and to discover where they were at this moment.
Chapter 83
This time I didn’t h
ave long to wait. I’d hardly started into my pint of Guinness when in she struts. Black is definitely her favourite colour. Apart from her blonde hair that is. She wore a leather biker jacket, black satin blouse and a short, black pleated skirt. Finished it off with black tights and black knee boots. She walked right up to me. No hanging about by the door this time. No talking to other blokes. Right up beside me. Hand on my arm, she says, ‘I’ll have a large glass of white wine please, babe.’
Babe she called me. Was this Christmas or what?
‘How’ve you been, the girl with no name?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, I’m fine. And it’s Aeron. But fancy meeting you the other day. A girl might start thinking she had a stalker?’
‘I was thinking the same about you.’
‘In your dreams, luv.’ We both laughed. I ordered her drink, and when it came she took a healthy gulp.
‘You look as though you needed that.’
‘Mmm. Been looking forward to it all afternoon.’
‘So what else have you been looking forward to?’
She smiled a devilish smile. I reckoned I’d found me a real naughty girl. At long last, I thought. Someone who thinks just like me. Someone who stalks just like me. She gave my arm a little squeeze but didn’t reply.
‘You want to grab something to eat?’ I asked.
‘That would be nice, but let’s have a few drinks first.’
I ordered a pint for me and another glass of wine for her. We found a small table in a corner, sat down opposite each other and chatted away. The whole time she had her hand on mine as she told me all about herself, and I lied through my teeth about what I’d done with my life. She asked me loads about Belfast and what had brought me to Liverpool. The whole time I’m thinking I’d died and gone to heaven. I was looking into the eyes of an angel. Okay, I bloody know it sounds cheesy, but I couldn’t remember if anything like this had ever happened to me before. I watched her every movement as she spoke. Her blonde hair had been straightened, a centre parting so that it fell down each side of her face. Her nose had a bit of a bump in the middle which didn’t do much for her profile, and she had a narrow mouth and short chin. Not classically pretty but bubbling with sex appeal. She definitely had something.
Hardly noticed that I’d drunk four pints and we were still chatting, gazing into each other’s eyes. A couple of times she leaned over the table and gave me a brief kiss. I took it as a promise of what was to come later. With all the beer, I dragged myself away from her and went for a slash. When I got back she stood up.
‘Want to get something to eat now? I know a nice Italian place not far from here.’
‘Great,’ I said. I downed the remainder of my beer. ‘Lead the way.’
Was pissing down when we stepped outside. She hurried along the street with her bag over her head, laughing. Then she stopped by a shop doorway and pulled me inside with her. Boy, she could kiss. Let’s leave it at that. When she’d had enough of my tongue she pulled me into the bistro which wasn’t busy, and we took a table by the window. And here’s a line I never heard from a girl before. She said it to me when I returned from another visit to the toilet.
‘Don’t order dessert, you can have it at my place.’
Can you believe it? How lucky was I?
After a pizza we strolled, hand in hand, through the damp night until we came to a street corner where I was going to hail a taxi for us. I was beginning to feel a bit knackered, though. I’d only had a few pints and a couple of glasses of wine in the restaurant, but my head was spinning.
‘No, we don’t need a taxi,’ she said.
‘You live close by?’
‘I have a driver.’
‘A driver? What, do you mean, like a chauffeur?’
She laughed at me. Not so much because of my question, more the way I had slurred my words. I was conscious enough to know I was leaning into her, but she didn’t seem to mind.
‘Not like a chauffeur, an actual chauffeur.’
‘What are you, fecking royalty?’
‘No, I’m just reasonably well off.’
She took out her phone and made a brief call.
‘We’re ready,’ she said. I was dumfounded. Visions of my time with Lady Victoria, the daughter of a duke, swept before me. But I’d had to take her the way I take all my girls. And now she was at the bottom of the Irish Sea. But this Aeron was different. What the hell had I found? She pulled me close, and we snogged.
Everything suddenly went pear-shaped. I can remember seeing a car pull into the side of the street. A black Mercedes. There was a man driving, but I was too drunk to make out his face. Too drunk to realise the significance of the black Mercedes. The last thing I remember is stumbling into the back seat with Aeron. We started kissing again as the car moved off, then all went black.
Chapter 84
I was foundered. Couldn’t fucking move. I woke up staring into the night sky. I could see the clouds moving across the moon and the branches of trees swaying in the wind. My head was thumping, and it took me a while to figure out what I’d been up to. Last thing I could remember was kissing Aeron. Didn’t know where. Didn’t know when. Just that we were kissing. I couldn’t figure anything out. I looked at my hands. They were tied to some kind of wooden thing, a frame or something. I thought maybe Aeron was into all this bondage shit. Couldn’t see my feet, but I couldn’t move them either. I was splayed out like a fucking chicken at a barbecue. All my clothes were off me except for my boxers. It was bloody freezing. I called out her name but got nothing back.
‘Aeron, luv, this is great fun, but do you not think you’re ripping the ass out of it? Come on, do something, get me out of here. I’m bloody freezing to death.’
Nothing. I tried shaking to get my hands free, but the wee bitch had used the same gear as I do. Cable ties. Then I realised something. She must have spiked my drink. Why else would I have passed out? Only had a few pints and a couple of glasses of wine. My god, she’d got me just like I got all of my girls. But why? What had I done to her? I’d been the perfect gent. What the hell did she want from me?
‘Aeron! Stop pissing around, luv.’
‘Aeron!’
I was getting seriously hacked off lying on this bloody thing. Started thinking what I would do to the wee bitch when I got free. Then my mind wondered. I’d heard about these strange killings in Liverpool recently where the victims had their heads cut off. What if that was about to happen to me? For the first time since I was a kid I was scared shitless.
‘Aeron! Please, luv. Get me out of this friggin’ thing.’ Then I heard something move, a rustling, like somebody was walking through a pile of leaves. But it was dark, couldn’t see fuck all.
‘Good evening, Mr Guy.’
I couldn’t entirely make out the face, but I recognised that smooth voice.
‘Collywell, what the fuck?’
Chapter 85
Alec Collywell assured Tara and Murray that their adopted children had not been in touch. Devastated by what was befalling their family, they were just as eager to trace Jemima and Jason as the police. Tara felt more uneasy by the minute. She’d convinced herself that these pair of killers were in the process of executing another victim.
She stood at the front door of the Collywell home in Melling. Daphne had taken to her bed, and Alec was trying his best to get some answers from the detectives.
‘I don’t understand,’ he kept repeating to Tara’s explanations.
‘It all happened before they came to you, Mr Collywell. I can’t give you the whole story just now. I really need to find them. Is there anywhere you can think of where they might be? Friends? Might they just be out at a concert, the theatre?’
The man was shaking his head at each suggestion.
‘No friends that I know of. They’ve always been very close to each other. As far as I know they don’t go out to shows or anything like that. Church maybe.’
‘Which church?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s in G
rassendale, that’s all I know.’
Murray was on his mobile straightaway getting someone at the station to check out churches in Grassendale.
‘Get a car out there,’ he said. ‘Any open church buildings go in and see if they’re inside.’
‘Are they religious, Mr Collywell?’ Tara asked.
‘Yes, go to church every Sunday, bible studies and the like.’
‘It is a Christian church then?’
‘Of course.’ He gave her a look to suggest she’d asked a stupid question.
‘Is there anywhere else? Please, Mr Collywell, think.’
‘Sorry, luv. I don’t know of any other places they might go. I can’t understand why they haven’t called. I’ve left messages on their phones.’
‘What vehicles do they drive?’ Murray snapped in.
‘Well, Jason has his car that both of them use.’
‘What type of car? What’s the registration?’ Murray was firing out the questions now. Tara’s frustration was growing as this man continued to fumble through his replies. The longer it took the more she was convinced they had an imminent murder to stop. Collywell gave Murray the registration of a 1985 black Mercedes-Benz 3000. A classic car. Tara rang the details through to St Anne Street.
‘Any other vehicles?’
‘Just the company van.’ Again Murray had to drag the information out of the man.
‘What type? Registration?’
Again Collywell slowly revealed details of the Oak-bespoke van, an Iveco Daily Box, white with the red logo and lettering of the furniture company. As they were about to leave, Daphne Collywell came to the door holding her dressing gown closed around her, firstly admonishing her husband for not inviting the police to come inside and secondly to ask of any progress in tracing her children.
‘I’m sorry, Daphne, we have nothing yet,’ Tara replied. ‘We will try to trace both vehicles.’
Lethal Dose; Lethal Justice; Lethal Mind Page 50