by D. E. White
Jess was still talking intently with the divers, pointing at the escape room, and back towards the office building. Metal stepping plates had now been extended, stretching like shiny mushrooms all the way from the main gates, round the office and further down to the end of the pier.
“Hey, Jess, bloody weird one, isn’t it? What do you think?” Dove asked when her friend had finished her conversation and the divers had climbed down from the end of the pier into the waiting police launch. She peered over the edge. “Did they find anything out there?”
“Not sure. Possibly just debris, but possibly not. I’ll let you know.” She bit her lip, turning to stare out to sea, before she spoke again. “I’m thinking, how the hell am I going to preserve evidence at this scene? Were they dead when they went into the escape room? Or did they drown in situ? And if it was the latter, why the fuck didn’t they just get out of the hatch when they realised there had been a malfunction and the waters were rising?” Jess said smartly, snapping her folder of notes shut and pocketing her pen. “You?”
“Pretty much the same. In addition, hoping it was an accident? Maybe a malfunctioning drainage system, and they were all pissed from partying so they couldn’t find the door?” Dove suggested.
“All of them? Nice try,” DS Lindsey Allerton said from behind them. “But we just checked out the outlets from the lower rooms. On Room Six, it’s been completely blocked and the pump mechanism jammed.”
“Shit. Anything from the group under the pier?” Dove asked. She hadn’t clocked any regulars she recognised earlier.
“Well, opinion differs from a boat arriving after midnight, and tying up to the end of the pier, to a swimmer messing around under the pier struts around the same time, to a purple unicorn galloping along the beach.” Lindsey sighed. “Having said that, they are not keen to talk to us, and will not stand up to being any kind of reliable witnesses, due to a fair amount of drug and alcohol use last night, which may or may not have impaired their vision and general perspective on life.”
DC Josh Conrad, who was in his early twenties, tall with curly black hair and dimples, agreed. “There was some kind of rubber bung fitted to the end of the drainage pipe . . . Here, take a look . . .” He proffered his phone and Dove leaned in to check out the tampered-with pipe. “The one on the left is where the water goes in, and I assume there is some kind of ballcock system that kicks in, with a shut-off valve, when the water rises to the correct level. The pipe on the right, as you can also see, is where the water should flow out to clear the room. In addition there is a pump system to push water in and help it out during the game.”
“There you go,” Jess added. “Once the water started coming in, if there was an automatic shut-off that was messed with, and the drainage outlet was blocked, the water would just keep on rising and fill the room like a goldfish bowl.”
“I hope they were dead when they went in,” Steve said soberly. “Because that is a hell of a way to die if they weren’t.”
CHAPTER SIX
The office was buzzing by six thirty when Dove and Steve joined the queue for coffee, before heading in for the briefing.
DI Blackman was writing quickly and clearly on the whiteboard, and shoved the pen in his pocket before he turned and addressed the team. “DCI Franklin is unfortunately off sick today, but with four victims this morning, plus the stabbing from last Monday as an ongoing case downstairs, we have decided to divide this particular case between myself and DI Lincoln. DCI Franklin reckons he’ll be back in two days but we can check in with DCI Colburn if we need her.”
He sighed, and Dove could almost feel his entire team silently sympathising. Everyone knew that funding cuts meant fewer and fewer officers, with specialities often shared between cases and area forces. This made every murder investigation a competition to get ahead of the queue for the pathologist, the forensic lab testing, or to get as many officers as they could assign to one team.
Drooping, grey-haired DI George Lincoln, nicknamed ‘Vampire’, normally volunteered for the night shift, but was just now gamely gulping his coffee and tucking into a box of doughnuts to boost his energy levels.
His morose expression rarely changed, and was enhanced by a sparse grey moustache. The only passions he appeared to harbour were for the job, and for tropical fish. He was divorced, but according to gossip he had profiles on several dating sites. Dove could only imagine it would take a fairly unique person to be interested in him.
DI Blackman was tapping the whiteboard with an impatient finger now, cutting through the murmurs as DC Maya Amin carefully pinned up photos of the victims. “Four victims. From early information we are working on the assumption that they drowned, but obviously this is pending PM reports and further evidence from our Crime Scene Manager.”
Here, he glanced at his colleague to take over. DI Lincoln sighed heavily and waved a hand towards the photographs. “Victims are Oscar Wilding, twenty-six.” He paused for a moment, in apparent sympathy for the dead man. Dove always thought he sounded like he’d been chewing on gravel for breakfast, and his voice grated on her nerves, but there was no doubt he was a shrewd investigator.
“Aileen Jackson, forty-two, Dionne Radley, thirty-nine and one as yet unidentified male, who appears to be in his mid- to late forties. The owners of Beach Escape Rooms, Jamie Delaney and Caz Liffey, state Jamie locked up as usual after their last customers and left the premises at around midnight last night. They have a four-month-old baby, and apparently Jamie has been working the late shifts recently.”
“CCTV appears to have been intentionally damaged during the break-in, and in addition to this we also have padlocks cut at the main gate and the hatch leading down into Room Six, which suggests the four victims may have entered illegally.” He paused to study the photographs of the four victims, which were now up on screen next to the whiteboard. “Looks like a neat job and some kind of bolt cutters were used, but these are yet to be recovered.”
“What about the video from the first responders?” DC Josh Conrad asked.
DI Blackman bent over the laptop on the table in front of him and clicked to bring the video up on the big screen. “As you can see, the padlock securing the hatch was cut, presumably to allow illegal entry.” He rewound the video to show the bodies in situ. “First question for me is, when the water started rising, why the hell didn’t they just exit the way they came in? The current answer, until we have more evidence, is that the ladder was removed to prevent them doing so, and the water never rose high enough for them to reach the hatch without it.”
“Witnesses reported seeing a swimmer near the escape room at around midnight. Presumably, whoever the swimmer was, they blocked the outflow pipe, and locked the emergency valve to ensure the water flooded the room, but never drained,” DC Amin volunteered.
When Dove first joined the MCT, Maya’s twin brother, also a DC, had been working on the team. But he had transferred the previous year, joining the Cybercrimes Unit, and his sister had taken his place on Major Crimes.
“Four victims — so was the perpetrator wanting to kill all of them, or was he after one, and the others were just collateral damage? The former says serial killer, the latter could be harder to trace,” DI Lincoln added, stroking his moustache thoughtfully with one nicotine-stained finger.
Dove was chewing a thumbnail as she viewed the video for the second time. Floating bodies, a locked room. “Did the coastguard find anything?” she asked eventually.
“No sign at all of any other victims or possible perpetrators, and no evidence a boat was around the pier last night, apart from the suggestion from one of the rough sleepers on the beach.” The DI shook his head. “But he started talking about mermaids and a purple unicorn right after he gave out that little gem. From the state of him, it’s unlikely he saw anything but the bottom of a bottle last night.”
“The water sports place next to the marina has jet-skis and various craft for hire, so we need to keep an open mind about a possible escape route for ou
r attackers or attacker,” DC Amin commented, pushing her short, dark hair away from her face.
DS Lindsey Allerton was making quick notes as she watched the video. “What if the perpetrator broke in with the other four, got in the escape room with them and then exited? Maybe he or she left, sealing the others inside, sliding the bolt on the hatch, removing the ladder, etcetera? The tox reports aren’t back yet, but the victims could have been drugged? Or perhaps we’re looking at a suicide pact?”
“Excellent thought, and another angle to consider.” DI Blackman took a gulp of coffee from his huge mug. He never relied on the paper cups from the machine, preferring to use his hefty Go fast or go home relic of some gruelling mountain-range marathon he had taken part in.
“Timeline as we know it so far starts at 4.15 a.m. when a dog walker spotted the bodies and called 999,” DI Lincoln continued. “But Jess said in her preliminaries she expected time of death ranged between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. It’ll be virtually impossible to work out who died first, but if anyone can, it’s Jess. Even so, accuracy is going to continue to be an issue, especially factoring in the saltwater and the warmth of the night.”
Dove glanced through her notes so far, listening intently to the flow of conversation. She was impatient to get out and start piecing together the victims’ last movements, but she knew these briefings were vital. Every single member of the team needed to be working from the same information. Cock-ups occurred when people went off and did their own thing. She herself — paying attention to lessons learned the hard way — was methodical and meticulous when it came to the tedious paperwork.
“We are currently working on the assumption all four were alive and walked in of their own accord, but again, we may find this was not the case,” DI Lincoln continued slowly and carefully, as he worked his way down his own notes, tracing items with a finger, pausing to put various relevant items up on screen. “As we mentioned earlier, CCTV was damaged during the break-in but the camera above the escape room was partially working. Technical Support have already recovered some footage showing the bodies were present and the room was filled with water by at least 2 a.m. this morning, which coincides with the tide times.”
“Thank you, George. One last thing before we start to crack this case.” DI Blackman held up a hand, briskly interrupting the murmurs from around the room, and read from an email on his iPad. “Independent experts have now confirmed what we suspected initially — that particular escape room was tampered with. The outlet pipe was blocked with a rubber bung, and the emergency shut-off was disabled, probably using a knife or chisel to prise the valve away from the wall connection.”
“There will be massive press interest, naturally,” DI Lincoln added before everyone started gathering their things, “and we really need the support of our community on this one, so we will be scheduling a press conference for later this afternoon to appeal for witnesses. Let’s get going.”
DI Blackman started pairing off the members of the MCT, before splitting the whole team in half. Numbers had been swelled by another five officers who had been drafted in, but it was still a small number for such a large investigation.
Dove and Steve were initially assigned to the team investigating the two female victims, and immediately began gathering up their notes, heading for the computers. They would report directly to DI Blackman.
Lindsey, assisted by Josh, was FLO, or Family Liaison Officer, for the relatives of Aileen Jackson, while DS Pete Wyndham, nicknamed ‘Donkey’ for his rather unfortunate dentistry and braying laugh, was assigned to the family of Oscar Wilding. Pending identification of the second man, Dove supposed the DI would have to pull at least two more FLOs out of the hat. Ideally there should be two FLOs per family, but logistically this often created problems when there were multiple cases ongoing and multiple victims to be considered.
FLOs were hugely important, not only as primary family support, but also as excellent detectives themselves, embedded among the relatives and friends of the deceased, teasing out threads of information that people were often unaware they had.
* * *
“So what really happened to your head?” Steve queried as they sat down at their computers and pulled up the case files for an update.
“I got into a fight,” Dove told him evasively, before seeing he wasn’t going to give up. She sighed and enlarged on the events of the previous night, while she sipped her second coffee. “Rankin’s team has taken the investigation.”
“Ouch. You were lucky to get off so lightly. Probably a drugs drop or something,” Steve suggested.
Dove considered the Claw Beach attack. “Maybe. It just felt odd. You know, like why beat the hell out of the victim when they’d already taken his stuff? The bloke who went for me seemed like he could have been off his head on something.” Dove watched as DI Blackman headed out of the door with DC Maya Amin to check back in with the escape-room owners.
She switched her mind back to the task in hand. “Something else has been bugging me. The name Jamie Delaney seems kind of familiar, and I can’t work out why. I suppose I’ve seen something about the escape rooms on social media, or in the newspapers . . .” Discovering a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps in her desk drawer, she pulled a face and dropped them on her desk for later.
“Or maybe your photographic memory has been damaged by the rock thrown at your head?” Steve suggested helpfully, and laughed as she threw the bag of crisps at him. “Sorry. The name doesn’t ring any bells with me, and anyway the DI’s taking the lead on that.”
Dove took off her grey jacket and slung it over the back of her chair. The air conditioning in the office was as erratic as the heating system, and today it seemed to be barely functioning. “It’ll come to me . . .”
“I can’t believe you’re working and Quinn hasn’t got you tucked up in bed at home, or at least taking the day off,” Steve added, looking at her closely. “You did tell him, didn’t you, Milson?”
“Of course I did, Parker,” Dove said briskly, attacking her keyboard and gulping her coffee, “but he was working the night shift and he wasn’t home by the time I was called out this morning. We had a brief conversation after it happened and a longer one after I got the all-clear from the doctor. He knows I can take care of myself. Now shut up, and get on with solving this investigation.”
Steve raised his eyebrows and pulled up some of the witness statements on his computer, speed-reading as he spoke. “There isn’t any new info in this lot, although the stuff about the person swimming in the sea around 1 a.m. is interesting. Lots of sleepers under the pier in this weather, so if this person is linked to our case, they must have known they risked having an audience. You got anything?”
“Nope. Jess must be tearing her hair out with vanloads of evidence to trawl through,” Dove replied. “Oh, wait — the bloods are back. Shit, look at this!”
Those left in the office glanced over at her exclamation, and Steve read over her shoulder: “Blood-alcohol levels were through the roof on all four, and the tox screen shows presence of zopiclone, a nonbenzodiazepine-related sleeping tablet. It is classed as a cyclopyrrolone, and molecularly distinct from benzodiazepine drugs. Drug names always get me. How do they even make these up?”
Dove, ignoring his banter, was skimming the lab report with intense interest. “So either they were drugged, or they voluntarily took the pills before they went in.” She was picturing the victims, mentally assessing each victim’s body weight, wondering how long the zopiclone would take to react.
“Different weights, different heights, tolerance to alcohol, impaired liver function,” Steve reeled off. “Lots of factors. They wouldn’t all necessarily have just keeled over, and certainly not at the exact same time. Maybe they take drugs on a regular basis and it was used as an alcohol enhancement?”
Dove frowned. “It’s not really a street drug, is it? Maybe we really are looking at a suicide pact.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Preliminaries and paperwork comp
leted, an hour later they headed out to speak to Dionne Radley’s husband, Tomas. Pausing by the coffee machine, Dove snagged two takeaway cups but the machine only half-filled the second. She frowned in exasperation and gave the machine a kick.
“I came up to check you were all right after last night, but I guess you’re feeling fine.” It was Jack Goss, the young PC who had been one of the first responders to the Claw Beach incident and later given her a lift to the hospital. He was grinning, having clearly seen her kicking the coffee machine.
“Oh, thanks. I’m fine. I was going to pop down and see you anyway, but we just landed a case. Any updates on last night?” Dove asked him.
“Camper van was empty. Looks like the driver and passenger set it in motion, jumped out at the last minute and scarpered over the hill into the Seaview Estate.” He pulled a face.
“At least they aren’t dead. I was a bit freaked when I heard the vehicle had gone off the cliff last night. What about the victim?” Dove asked, having already decided not to tell him she had a sneaked a look at the case file earlier. She had her own case and nosing in on someone else’s was considered bad form, not to mention a pain in the arse.
“Changed his story a few times, but now claims he was just coming home from working late at the office, and decided to sit and chill out somewhere nice and quiet before he went home to the wife.”
Dove raised an eyebrow, and immediately wished she hadn’t — although hidden by her hair, the head wound was still sore. “You don’t sound convinced.”
“CCTV shows he left the office at 6.30 p.m. He works in the centre of Abberley for a very respectable solicitors’ firm, Pearce and Partners. Our vic lives out towards Stollyton village, which as I’m sure you know means he was geographically taking a big detour if he is telling the truth. If it was a straightforward case of carjacking or an opportunist mugging, why would he lie?” PC Goss said. “You did say in your statement you thought the attackers were an older man and a younger boy . . .”