THE ABBERLEY BEACH MURDERS an addictive crime thriller with a fiendish twist (Detective Dove Milson Book 3)

by D. E. White

  And then I looked up and saw he’d started trimming his hedge with hand clippers, precisely snipping away feathery leaves. He stared with that intense, slightly calculating look. He didn’t even flinch when I stared back at him. I’ve never ever challenged him before. Instead of turning away, he smiled and nodded at me, as though he had been waiting for me to acknowledge our connection.

  It freaked me out. I grabbed my books and ran inside, into the kitchen. I grabbed a sports drink from the fridge and banging the door closed. All the magnets from our holiday to Spain and certificates from school fell to the floor.

  The kitchen was empty, but I could hear Mum upstairs, telling Jamie off for leaving his clothes all over the floor of his bedroom again.

  Mum’s voice is bringing me back to normal. The feel of the cool black lino tiles on the kitchen floor under my bare toes, the squashy cream leather sofa next to the shelf of cookery books. It’s all just like anyone else’s house. I can hear the murmur of the TV, the beeping of the timer on the cooker, but I’m drifting again . . .

  I’m safe now.

  It will be okay.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jess had no further information on the partial print on the shut-off valve, but suggested it might be a match to one of the plumbers who had completed maintenance on the system the week before. “As far as they can tell, the system was working perfectly, but with the bung in place and the emergency shut-off disabled, there was nothing to stop the water from filling the room.”

  “And we didn’t get anything from the hatch to the actual room?” Dove queried hopefully.

  “Sorry, love. Lots of prints on the shiny glass and chrome including all of our victims, the two owners, and numerous unidentified yet.” She paused. “There was one other thing. The lock on the roof hatch in Escape Room Six is a simple bolt-and-padlock affair. The padlock was cut using the same bolt cutters as the main entrance gate.”

  Dove digested this for a moment. “There’s still the issue of why didn’t they just open the hatch and get out when they saw the water rising so fast?”

  “There was plenty of alcohol in their systems — perhaps they just got confused and simply couldn’t find the way out,” Jess suggested. “It was dark. They were pissed. They may not have realised how serious it was until it was too late.”

  “You think?”

  “Not really,” Jess admitted. “But I’m just throwing it out there.”

  “Two more things,” Dove added. “Did you get a vodka bottle from the bin?”

  There was a pause. “Yes, with DNA and prints matching Dionne Radley and Ellis Bravery. Cigarette butts showing DNA matching all four victims, and a used tissue matching Oscar Wilding’s. You saw the report from inside the room? Condoms, phones, etcetera.?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “The water samples showed blood matches to Dionne and Oscar, plus there were traces of vodka in there.”

  “They took supplies in with them?” Dove supposed that made sense in terms of busting the blood-alcohol levels. “No trace of any other empty bottles or cans on scene though?”

  “No.”

  “Great, thanks, Jess.” Dove ended the call, and opened another packet of sweets as she went back to her computer. They were missing something. She could feel it. The focus kept shifting from victim to victim, but surely Ellis Bravery was the key. He was the link to Caz and Jamie, to Jamie’s past . . .

  “Wetsuit!” Dove said suddenly, looking up from the masses of photographic evidence. “Jamie keeps his wetsuit at the office, and it was hanging on the dryer when we went to bring him in. There was a box of other stuff too — gloves, masks, fins . . .”

  “So?” Steve glanced over from his own computer.

  “So what if he wore the suit and the gloves to swim down and put the bung in place? It would be sensible to avoid any skin contact in case we could trace DNA or prints on the bung or pipe . . . I mean, it’s unlikely because of all the seawater washing around, but if he was being careful . . .” Dove suggested. “So much evidence was bagged and tagged from the whole place, but there isn’t anything to say the wetsuits were checked.”

  “True. It’s hot weather, so unless he thought ahead, as you say, why would you put one on when it’s sweltering outside? But I’m not sure how you’d prove which suit had been worn recently. He could have worn it any time in the last few weeks,” Steve pointed out.

  The DI called them into his office. “Caz Liffey is downstairs wanting to change her statement. She must have freaked out hearing Jamie would be staying with us for a little while. I want you two to interview her, and Maya and I will then talk to Jamie again, depending on what she says.”

  “Yes, boss,” Dove said. Her heart was thumping hard. It was that same thrill of excitement she got every time the chase began, and the suspect was twisting around trying to escape. Would Caz admit to the murders or did she really not know exactly what had happened the night of the twenty-fifth?

  Caz, small and muscular, with her long, yellowish hair piled on top of her head in a plastic clip, was huddled on a chair in the interview room, looking as if she was about to burst into tears. She kept blinking and gnawing at her bottom lip, and she had a smear of something that looked like toothpaste on her chin.

  Her solicitor sat next to her, files open and pen ready. “My client would like to revise her statement regarding the night of July twenty-fifth. She has been under extreme stress, suffering from postnatal depression and insomnia. In addition, last night her baby girl had to be admitted to hospital, which has placed additional strain on my client’s mental health.”

  “Would you like to tell us what happened, then?” Steve suggested, smiling at her. “We’re so glad your baby is okay now. It must have been terrifying.”

  Caz pulled a strand of her hair around and put it in her mouth, chewing the split ends. Her shoulders were hunched forward and her eyes shadowed with purple bags. Eventually she pushed her hair away and answered, eyes darting wildly from one person to the next. “Yes! It was awful when she was just fitting and I thought she’d stopped breathing . . .”

  “Would you like another glass of water, or a hot drink?” Dove asked gently, noticing Caz had already drained her plastic cup.

  The other woman glanced down at the cup, vaguely, as though she had only just noticed it. “No . . . Thank you. I want to tell you something first. Jamie told me he’d seen Ellis Bravery in the street in Abberley about a month ago, and I was shocked. I never thought he’d show up in the same town as us. Turns out he’d been living here all along. Ironic.” Caz abandoned her hair, and pulled her sleeves down over her hands now, long cuffs covering her small, stubby fingers.

  “I imagine it’s been emotional for you both,” Steve commented.

  “Yes! We went to visit Jamie’s parents the next day, and although I told Jamie not to tell them, I think he did, because they were kind of not with it all morning.” She dipped her gaze, picking at her cuffs now, with restless stubby fingers. “Mickey was my friend and we were in the gymnastics squad together. It is almost impossible to believe she’s been lying in a bed for almost five years.” Tears slid down her cheeks, and she sniffed.

  “So what happened that night, Caz? Did you kill Ellis Bravery, Dionne Radley, Aileen Jackson and Oscar Wilding?” Dove asked.

  For a moment Caz sat open-mouthed at such a direct approach, and glanced at her solicitor before answering. “Of course not! We would never do that. But when Jamie called to say Ellis was actually in the escape room, I panicked.” She paused and shifted on her seat as though it was uncomfortable. “When Jamie said we had another booking from the Fantasy Play man, I was pleased. We needed the cash to pay back our loan, and he paid well. But then he called me and at first he could hardly speak . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “He told me one of the men was Ellis Bravery.”

  “And just to recap for the recording, Ellis Bravery is the man he believes is responsible for Mickey’s attack?”

&
nbsp; “Yes.” She blinked hard, eyes wet, voice trembling. “The police really screwed up on Mickey’s investigation. Everyone knows it was Ellis and here he was walking around free, coming into our business to have sex. At least these women were legal, I suppose, but I guess he moved on from underage girls.”

  “So you picked up the baby and went over to the pier,” Steve prompted.

  “I suppose. I hardly remember what happened after he called, only that I needed to help him,” Caz said. “I panicked. All I was thinking was that I needed Lila safe and Jamie safe, and then nothing else would matter.” She was crying properly now.

  “Caz, do you need a moment?” the solicitor asked.

  She shook her head, dragged a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose loudly. “Sorry . . . I’m sorry, it’s just everything is such a mess . . . I don’t know if I went to the pier . . .”

  Steve placed the street-cam pictures on the table between them. “Yes, you did, because this is you walking towards the pier at 12.20 a.m.”

  Caz stared at the images, blinking hard.

  “What happened when you arrived?” Dove asked softly. “You said you were worried about Jamie. How did he seem?”

  Caz took a long, ragged breath and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. “He was crying. When I got in and put Lila down in her basket, Jamie freaked out completely, started throwing pens around. Oh, not at us, just at the windows and he kicked the bin over . . .”

  “Caz, did Jamie speak to Ellis when he arrived with the other Fantasy Play clients? Did they maybe have a quick conversation?” Dove asked.

  “No! Oh no, Jamie said he was so shocked and Ellis didn’t seem to recognise him, so he just let them all in and came to the office to ring me.”

  “Did you see the four people in Escape Room Six as you arrived?” Dove asked.

  Caz shook her head. “No. It was dark, and there wasn’t much of a moon that night. The lights were off except in the office and Escape Room Six is below the level of the pier.” She seemed to have calmed down a little and recited the rest of her new statement without much emotion. “We decided it would be best if I stayed until the Fantasy Play people had gone, and I would show them out so Jamie didn’t have to face them,” she said carefully. “There are cameras in the office, and I recognised Ellis Bravery, the filthy old perv, on the screen.”

  “Did you know him well when you were younger?” Steve asked.

  She shrugged. “I just knew him as one of the neighbours. My stepmum used to sell him duty-free cigarettes she got from a friend, so he came round sometimes.” Caz sighed. “But it was always Mickey who would spot him perving behind the hedge . . . She was almost scared of him, but the rest of us hardly noticed him. Like everyone said, in the end there was nobody else who could’ve tried to kill her. I don’t know who found out that Ellis had been involved in a child-porn investigation, but mud sticks, doesn’t it?”

  “Your stepmum was still happy to invite him to her home and sell him cigarettes, though?” Steve said.

  Caz shrugged. “We needed the extra cash. She didn’t care what you’d done as long as it wasn’t directed at her, and she never paid much attention to gossip. She was in the minority.”

  “Going back to the night of the twenty-fifth,” Dove said. “What happened after the hour was up?”

  “I went to show them out. Jamie was just sitting on the floor in the office cuddling Lila. He didn’t move or react at all when I said the time was up,” Caz said. “The hatch was already open and they staggered a bit when they came out, pissed as farts, thanked me and I let them out and locked the gate behind them. All I was thinking about was getting back to Jamie and Lila and us all being safe.”

  “You showed the Fantasy Play clients to the main gate and locked it behind them? These four people?” She pushed her iPad across to Caz who studied the faces and nodded briskly.

  “Right out the front gate. I just said good night and locked up. They’d already paid Jamie, and as I said, they were drunk, so we were hardly going to stand around having a chat, were we?”

  “Did you see which way they walked, or if they got a taxi?” Steve made a note on his paperwork.

  “No, sorry. What with everything that had happened, I was so desperate to get Jamie and the baby home, and it was such a shock to see Ellis after all these years,” Caz said. “After I locked up, I went back to the office, turned all the lights off, locked up there, and we walked home down the beach way . . . It was warm, Lila was crying a bit, and Jamie was still completely silent, like he was stunned or in a trance. We went home, fed Lila, and went to bed. Next thing we knew we got a call saying there were four dead bodies in our escape room.”

  * * *

  DCI Franklin called a quick briefing in the incident room at 2.30. “I’m aware we’re not all present, but I think we are making significant progress on this case, and I wanted to clarify a couple of things. Mainly so we can stop chasing a few of these leads.” He indicated the whiteboard, which had so many individual strands that it looked like a ball of wool gone rogue from someone’s knitting. “Jon?”

  DI Blackman took the nod from his superior and proceeded. “Aileen Jackson seems to have been planning to run away with Oscar Wilding. She probably had another phone to communicate with him, which we are currently trying to locate.” He paused and glanced down at his notes. “Her husband Billy, as well as working at Tesco’s, sometimes does a bit of cash-in-hand for a friend who runs a business providing plumbing and heating engineers. Josh?”

  DC Conrad was swiping through documents on his iPad. “He was with his mate, Keith Arkle, when the business was called in to the Beach Escape Rooms to fix a faulty outflow pipe, and an electrical fault. We spoke to Keith and a couple of his other employees, and they confirmed it was the first time they had been called to that particular venue, but they fixed the problem within the hour. I’ve got the details. It was just a short circuit in the wiring behind the panel. The partial print the lab lifted from the outside panel is a match to Keith Arkle.”

  “So if Billy had found out about his wife and Oscar, and maybe followed her that night, he had working knowledge of the mechanisms used for the murder,” DC Pete Wyndham commented. “Hang on, isn’t the valve a manual shut-off?” He was looking at the photographs now up on the big screen on the wall.

  Josh pointed a little to the left of the control panel. “If the electrics fail, the system for the affected room is supposed to shut down automatically, and if that fails to activate, yes, you twist that wheel and lock it by hand.”

  Pete frowned, nodding along. “So essentially, what you are saying is, nobody twisted the wheel?”

  “Pretty much,” Josh agreed. “The only way out was the entrance/exit hatch. It should have still been possible for them to escape, or at least float on top of the water, if their normal reactions hadn’t been impaired by the substances they had imbibed. Dionne’s husband claims she never learned to swim, so that would put her at an immediate disadvantage.”

  “But if somebody slid the bolts on that, they had no chance of survival, poor buggers,” DI Blackman put in, picking up his coffee mug and taking a thoughtful sip.

  “We also have Tomas Radley, Dionne’s husband, who claims their marital problems were common knowledge and they were going to file for divorce, yet Dionne is creeping around changing clothes in a public toilet and pretending she’s at work when she could have just told him she was off on a jolly,” Steve pointed out. “He already knew she was having affairs, so why the secrecy?”

  “Unless the secrecy from Dionne was all for Ellis?” Dove suggested. “He’s got the most to lose, hasn’t he? High-flying entrepreneur, with trophy girlfriend who sleeps soundly, and hears what she wants to hear as long as he keeps the money coming in. Not to mention he’s left his brush with child pornography behind him and buried his involvement with the Mickey Delaney case so successfully, he didn’t even recognise Jamie.”

  “Maybe he did recognise Jamie?” DI Blackman commented.
“We only have Jamie’s word that he didn’t. But he was having a party night with his friends, so he wouldn’t have wanted to rock the boat. Was he intending to speak to him afterwards? Jamie already admitted he was totally thrown, and quite understandably so.”

  “I just can’t see them both letting the moment pass,” Dove said. “Maybe Jamie started an argument, maybe accused Ellis in front of his friends, in front of Dionne, who he appears to have been seeing for a while according to Tracey at Camillo’s. Perhaps Ellis, now, as you say, the high-flying businessman instead of the out-of-work neighbour, threatened Jamie to keep his mouth shut . . . Maybe threatened to bring down his business?” Dove struggled to run with her strand of thought, but Steve was nodding.

  “Ellis has a lot of property interests, and he sits on the town council. He’s turned into Mr Respectable.” Steve was flicking through his notes.

  “Jamie and Caz were both there at the same time as our victims, they both admitted lying in their original statements, and they had motive and means,” Lindsey said. “I can’t see we should be looking anywhere else now.”

  “Caz has gone home, but DC Amin and I are having another chat with Jamie now. If he did it, for this to go through, the CPS are going to want hard evidence and at the moment it’s all circumstantial,” DI Blackman said, and DI Lincoln nodded in agreement. “Josh and Lindsey, find out exactly where Billy Jackson was during those four missing hours on the night of the twenty-fifth, so we can eliminate him from our enquiries.”

  “Caz said she and Jamie went to visit his parents in Salthaven the day after he claims to have seen Ellis in the street. She says they agreed not to tell his parents, but thinks Jamie did tell them. So Russ and Claire Delaney were also aware Ellis was still in the area,” Dove added.

  The DI nodded. “Might be worth talking to them, just to verify where they were on the twenty-fifth. It must be a big shock, to discover the person who you believe tried to murder your teenage daughter, by throwing her into a quarry, is back in town. I wonder why he moved back in the first place?”