The Retirement Party

by Graham Miller

  'I did spend the first few years looking over my shoulder, but I think he has a short attention span. Is he still the same?'

  'Pretty much,' DC Angel said. 'Every few years he gets a new sixteen-year-old and keeps her pregnant until she gets too old and moves on.'

  'So I was right. He ain't going to spend the money on chasing me when he's got a new woman on the go.' She paused to study DC Angel. 'You know all about him though, don't you? What was worth you driving all the way up here for?'

  'Well, I don't know if you've seen the papers or not, but two teenage girls have been killed in the last few weeks.'

  'And you wanted to know if maybe Greg was behind it?' She stopped to think, staring down at the grass. 'I know Greg, or I knew him anyway. Moved in with him and everything. And I have to say that I honestly can't see it. Look at me – I'm a thorn in his side, I got away and he can't control me. And he hasn't even sent a private detective after me. The only reason someone like Greg would kill is that the victim escaped from his control.'

  Angel shook her head. 'We only found a tenuous connection between Watts and one victim. He certainly wasn't grooming either of them.'

  'There you go then. If he's still at it after I got away, he's probably got his hands full with all his exes.' She paused. 'Or did more of the others escape?'

  'No, they're all dotted all over the estate, with their hands out for money from Watts.'

  'Are you going to do anything about him?'

  'He is of interest to police.'

  'But he's too clever? He was always smart when I knew him. Working out the angles.'

  'He'll slip up. They always do.'

  'Well, he's possessive, that's his weakness. He has to be in control. His family is probably the only way to get to him.'

  The conversation petered out after that. DC Angel couldn't help but feel that she'd been cheated. She'd spent a whole morning chasing this lead and had come away with the same answer she always got – Watts was innocent of the murders.

  As she drove back south, she wondered what she had achieved. She knew more about Watts, that was sure. But she didn't know if anything she'd learnt was going to be of use.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  DC Angel was driving south down the M5 when the phone rang. She stabbed at the phone on the dashboard and managed to get it onto hands free mode without causing an accident.

  'Angel? Where are you now?'

  'I'm heading south down the M5 just outside Bristol. Should be back soon enough.'

  'Well can you make it sooner?' Haines asked. 'While you've been gone, our killer has struck again. And this time he left the girl alive.'

  'Give me five minutes to get off the road, and we'll sort it. I'd rather take a few notes,' she said. 'Here's the exit already. I'll call you back in a moment.' Soon she was parked up in a lay-by on a main road. 'What do you need me to do, boss?'

  'Can you go straight to Bradwick Hospital? You've spent the most time looking over the victims' details so you'll be the first to spot any connections.'

  'Will do, boss. I'll give you a ring when I've seen the victim.'

  'She's called Carla Jones. We've a uniform down there guarding her. I'll just check with him which ward she's been put on and text it to you.'

  Before she rejoined the motorway, DC Angel reached into the glove box for a well-worn map of the area and her list of Dark Cars. She quickly scanned through the list and the map and decided that she could loop through a residential area. Hopefully it'd only add two or three minutes onto her journey, but she might be able to tick another car off the list.

  DC Angel parked up in the hospital car park. She'd crossed one entry off her list – she hadn't even had to stop; she'd just rolled past the driveway and seen that the car didn't match the photo.

  She strode into the main building. Since she'd started working for the police, she'd noticed a complete change both in her attitude and that of the staff who worked there. She was now on the inside – they were all on the same side.

  She was excited at the prospect of interviewing someone who'd actually seen the killer. This was the best news they'd had since the first body had been found in a grim yard behind a row of shops.

  DC Angel made her way with familiarity through the corridors of the hospital. Somehow, someone had found a bed for the woman, in a side room where a policeman could sit outside in the corridor. She showed her warrant card to the burly looking PC who was working his way through a book of puzzles.

  She saw the long dark hair of their victim spread out over the pillow, framing her pale face. Under her chin, a long straight bruise cut straight across her neck. DC Angel angled her head and saw a small round point bruise on the woman's temple. She was attached to monitors and had an oxygen tube under her nose. A nurse appeared silently.

  'Poor thing. She hasn't stirred since she was brought in. It's that small bruise on her temple, it's a nasty head injury. The neck looks worse but the airway is open and it should heal nicely.'

  'Thanks, any idea when she'll wake?'

  'She's been given sedatives to help her sleep for the moment. The doctors are about to do their rounds, after that we'll find out when you'll be able to interview her.'

  'Fine, thanks.'

  With nothing else to do, DC Angel went out to the corridor to phone through to DCI Haines. They had a short conversation where Angel was ordered to find and conduct a more in-depth interview with the primary witness after the initial one at the scene.

  After a few minutes in the car with her mobile she found out that their witness, one Barbara Weathers, was behind the bar at the yacht club.

  Bradwick and District Yacht Club was a complete time-warp. DC Angel had no idea if it was members only or not so she fingered her warrant card in her pocket as she walked in. The bar was a large square room with windows around three sides, presumably so members could look out at the sea and judge the conditions. The decor was straight out of the seventies – wood panelling, photographs, oars and other boat memorabilia. It even had a huge wooden board with all the past presidents written in gold, going back to 1837. There were a few fruit machines dotted about but they were all turned off at the plug.

  There were only a few people in the entire place and they were all scattered around the room sitting at tables. Behind the deserted bar was DC Angel's quarry – Mrs Barbara Weathers. She looked like a formidable matron, all bosom and carefully starched curls.

  When introductions had been made, she launched straight into her story. 'I was out first thing this morning, walking Maltravers, my Labrador, when he suddenly bounded off. Well, I thought he'd just caught scent of a squirrel or something. Then I heard the barking and a man shouting. Next thing I knew there was an awful howl, and it all went quiet. I can tell you, I hurried over there as soon as I could.'

  'And what did you find?'

  'Well, that poor woman, unconscious on the ground. And Maltravers too, he was walking round in circles, shaking his head. I think that brute must have hit him with whatever he was attacking that girl with.'

  This was what DC Angel was here for. 'Did you see the man who attacked them?'

  'No, not a hair. Well, there might have been a shadow further on, you know across the heath. Just disappearing into the trees by the road. But I wasn't really looking, you know.'

  'That's understandable. What happened next?' DC Angel was already making notes.

  'Well, you must know all of that. I told the nice officer at the scene. I stayed with Maltravers and that woman and used my mobile to call for help.'

  Angel knew full well that Mrs Weathers would have been interviewed immediately after the event and she would read that account back at the station. But it was important to cover the ground at least twice so she gently led her over the story, hoping that she'd pick up something new.

  When it was over, Mrs Weathers asked cautiously, 'How is that poor girl? Was it the same as the other two?'

  Angel wanted to sigh and rest her head on the bar. But she main
tained her professional demeanour. She knew that Haines' attempts to keep the story from the press were ultimately doomed. But he knew it was a futile effort too, he merely sought both to delay the story reaching the press and to minimise its impact when it got there. She saw a chance to see how it was going. 'What makes you think that it might be linked to other cases?'

  'Oh, don't you come like that with me! I know the local rag hasn't made much of a fuss about it but I'm the barmaid here. I get all the gossip, usually from at least two different directions. Two young girls get strangled within a couple of weeks and the whole town is bound to be talking about it. When I saw that girl with the mark across her throat... well was she the third victim?'

  'We don't know yet.' Angel saw the look on Barbara's face and quickly carried on. 'No, seriously we don't. I'm not hiding anything from you. We need to examine all the evidence, including your statement and then have a case conference. Compare all three cases and see what conclusions we can draw.'

  'Well, you don't need to worry about me. Mum's the word.' Barbara sounded sincere but DC Angel had her doubts. She was a barmaid after all and was obviously the centre of the gossip. 'That Inspector Hayes, he's nice, isn't he?'

  'You mean DCI Haines? He's my boss.' Angel had a lot of respect for Haines, but she didn't think of him as nice. Tough, shrewd, and fair maybe, but not nice.

  'That's it! Haines. He got my Maltravers moved to the vet that has the account for the police dogs. Everything he needs will be paid for. I won't have to spend anything.'

  'That is nice.' DC Angel also thought that if the dog had any evidence like fibres in its teeth, then they would be the best vets to recover it. But it was a good decision in terms of PR too, she had to acknowledge. 'And your dog is a bit of hero too.'

  'Well, who knows what would have happened to that poor woman if Maltravers hadn't bounded to the rescue?'

  DC Angel could only nod as she had a very good idea what would have happened.

  Part 3

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The next day, the call came through from the hospital that they were all clear to interview Carla Jones, who had now been positively confirmed as victim number three.

  She was sitting up in hospital, looking rather bored.

  'Hi. I'm Detective Constable Angel and I'd like to know what you can remember about the attack.'

  'I wrote it down,' she said in a hoarse whisper. 'Bored.' She brandished an A4 pad.

  'Does it hurt to talk?' DC Angel asked and was rewarded with a nod. She took the pad and started reading the close, neat handwriting.

  'I have to warn you, that I can't remember being attacked. The consultant said that it's to do with the memories being interrupted before they were formed or moved from short to long term. Whatever the reason, I don't remember a lot.

  'I remember the normal things I did in the morning before I went to work. Waking up, shower, breakfast, all of that. When I left the house, I put the new Foo Fighters album Concrete and Gold on my phone, put my headphones in and set out for work. I definitely remember listening to Run and thinking about the video and then it's a blank.'

  DC Angel stopped reading and got her phone out. Run was the second track and less than seven minutes of the whole album. They'd worked out a rough timeline, and she was attacked between fifteen and twenty minutes into her usual thirty-minute walk to work. She went back to the pad, aware that Carla Jones was watching her closely.

  'It's so odd and frustrating. When people said that they don't have any memory of being drunk, I never used to believe them. I didn't think it was really a thing. But, now, here I am. Two songs, then nothing.

  'I know that I was attacked. But all I remember is waking up here in the middle of the night. It was all dark, but noisy with the beeps and the nurses moving around checking everyone. I tried to ask the nurse what was going on. I could hardly make any noise. Luckily the nurse explained who I was and why I was in hospital.

  'After that snapshots keep popping into my head. Lying on the ground, I could feel the grass on my neck, see the light through the trees. There was this ring of faces around me. Some woman who looked like an aunt, and a dog, and a policeman. I remember hearing barking and a yelp. I was in the ambulance, it was rocking to and fro, people were trying to help me.

  'I know what you want to know, but I didn't see who attacked me, I'm sorry, that's all a big blank.'

  DC Angel looked up from the pages to the woman who wrote them. She wondered what would be left after this attack. Would Carla suffer from PTSD? One attack that took less than thirty seconds could easily carry on for months and years. She looked again at the pale face, dark hair, and bruised neck and a wave of sympathy washed over her.

  She tried to frame her questions in yes or no format to save the woman's voice. 'Can you remember any detail at all about your attacker?'

  Carla shook her head.

  'And this is all you can remember?'

  A nod of the head.

  'Do the doctors think any more memories will come back?'

  Carla shrugged.

  'Listen, this isn't an official statement. But could you just write at the bottom that this is a true account of what you can remember and sign it. Then I'll take it and enter it into evidence.' Carla nodded, took the pad back, wrote on the bottom then returned it to DC Angel. 'I'll leave you be now, to get some rest. Do you know if your voice will get better?'

  'With rest,' she croaked and nodded.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  When DC Angel got back to the office, a full meeting of the MIT was called, before she had a chance to debrief Haines on her interview with Carla Jones.

  'Right, we've got plenty of points of correlation between the attack on Carla Jones and the first two murders. It's enough for us to consider that she is the third victim, even though she's a survivor. On that point, Angel, did we get anywhere on the interview?'

  'Sorry, boss. With the combination of the blow to the head and the oxygen deprivation she has no memory of the event. I have got this statement.' She held up the pages of A4 then read them out to the assembled officers. 'As you can see, it confirms what we know and nothing more. She was on her way to work, got attacked, and was saved by Barbara Weathers and her dog.'

  'Damn!' Haines said. 'We're going to have to get right on top of this, straight away. With three attacks we have a very small window to close this out before the chief super pulls it out from us with a review and passes it over to another team.

  'With all of this in mind, we're terminating the multi-agency immigration checks and putting all our manpower into solving the murders.'

  'What about...?' DI Hargreaves stopped to consider what to say next. He looked carefully around the room. 'What about the original reasons for launching the operation in the first place?'

  DCI Haines took a deep breath. 'Well, we're near to resolving that problem. I have information received that there'll be a big meeting coming up very soon. The new dealers who are trying to get established in town are going to have a resupply and that's when we'll strike. Once we get the precise time and date then we can launch the raid and clear that whole problem out of the way. There isn't much we can do in terms of planning until we know the details. Hopefully we'll have caught the killer before we get all the details of the big drug raid. That's where we will be putting all our resources – making sure this killer is caught quickly. But, as soon as we know about the raid, we'll have to switch regardless of how we are on the murder investigation. We have to be flexible on this one.'

  There were nods and mutters around the room. Everyone could see that there was plenty of overtime and hard work ahead. Haines carried on talking. 'Right. We have three attacks to deal with. Let's go back to the beginning and work all these cases hard. All three victims were on foot, so let's get good, solid timelines for each one. Likewise we need to work their social networks, look for common points of intersection. Our killer is picking these women out for some reason. We need to find that common thread and follow i
t until it leads to our man.'

  There was some grumbling as people went away to their assigned tasks. 'Bloody poxy, that's what it is.' Inspector Hargreaves was waiting in line at the coffee machine, making the most of his audience. 'It's not like we dropped the ball on the first two killings is it? We've been over the CCTV, fingertip search, house to house, and full forensics. This might be one of those cases that comes up on Crimewatch in twenty years' time.'

  'If you don't feel up to it, Glen, you could always put in for retirement.' Haines was walking past and couldn't resist a dig.

  'No, boss, just a bit of banter, that's all.'

  'Right, you listen. We've got three cases now. When we went over Mazey Taylor we were thinking of a single case. Now we can compare all that data to the other two, find a link.'

  DC Angel found herself nodding. Most of the Taylor case was compromised because they were trying to catch the WankyBois. Finally, she agreed with Haines – they needed to start again and find the link between the victims.

  'Right you are, boss,' DI Hargreaves said. But DC Angel looked at his eyes and saw something else. He was straining at the leash, counting down the days until he would no longer have to answer to Haines on a day to day basis. She didn't judge him harshly for it – she knew how frustrating it must be to be the pretender to the throne.

  She took her coffee back to her desk. She wanted to go through the CCTV to see if DCM had made an appearance at the latest crime scene too. Once again, she went through her battered atlas – the crime scene was a big patch of green in the middle of a nest of streets. She sighed and reached for the computer. With a bit of zooming in and out she found out where the footpaths joined actual roads. She flicked over to the CCTV system.

  She groaned. It was residential area very sparsely covered by cameras. She traced it back. There were main roads but they were quite a way from the scene. If the car did turn up there then it would be circumstantial at best.