by Ellis, Tim
‘I’m doing a favour for a friend.’ He took the proffered hand, shook it and indicated Barth. ‘This is Constable Barth.’
He nodded at Barth. ‘Pleased to meet you both. How can I help you?’
‘Did you kill DCI Pine and the others?’
‘It’s a bit early for whisky, but what about a tea or coffee?’
‘An answer to the question will do just fine.’
‘Moving beyond the idea that I’m simply a legitimate businessman trying to make ends meet in difficult times, the answer to your question is no. Ezra Pine and I had a certain arrangement that suited both of our interests. Now, it seems to be every man for himself. Is that it?’
‘No. You can bring back Detective Isolde Koll from Bulgaria.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘On instructions from Pine, you spirited Koll out of the country and gave her to a drug tsar in Bulgaria – I want her back.’
‘I think you’ve come to the wrong psychiatric hospital, Inspector. Now, if there’s nothing else . . . ?’
‘I forgot to mention that Constable Barth boxes for the police force.’ He nodded at Barth. ‘She calls herself “The Mauler”.’
Barth took two paces forward and planted a right hook on the left side of Hargrave’s jaw.
He bounced off the desk and fell face forward unconscious onto the floor.
Slow off the mark, Arthur came at them from behind. Barth pirouetted on the ball of her left foot, side-stepped and stopped him in his tracks with an uppercut that began somewhere near the floor.
He flew backwards, crashed into the back of the door and sat on the floor with his chin resting on his chest.
‘Good job, Constable.’
‘Thanks, Sir.’
There was a jug of water on a tray with glasses on top of a sideboard. Dougall picked the jug up and poured the water over Hargrave’s head.
Hargrave began spluttering, and tried to get up.
Barth put her foot on his neck.
‘You’re a dead man, Inspector.’
‘I think you’ve got the wrong impression about me, Hargrave. As I said, I want Koll back, and I want her back alive. You’ve got until midnight on Sunday. If she hasn’t walked into Shrub End Police Station by then, I’m going to close you down.’
‘With what evidence? My solicitor . . .’
‘Forget about evidence, forget about solicitors, forget about the law protecting you. Sometimes, we find it useful and cost-effective in these austere times not to concern ourselves with minor obstacles like that. When a local police force come across an intractable problem, they call me in. I have a few officers under my command who like nothing better than to show local criminals that they’re not above the law. Usually, I don’t give any warning, but you’ve got something I want. So, let me explain how the process of “closure” will work if Koll doesn’t re-appear. On Monday your house will go up in flames, and then I’ll take your family, your money, and eventually your life.’
He indicated for Barth to take her foot off Hargrave’s neck, and pulled him up by his tie. ‘The fact that you’re living the good life in this house, driving a Rolls Royce, sending your kids to private school and your wife is flouncing about like the lady of the fucking manor in designer shoes and clothes really pisses me and my team off. It’s like you’re sticking two fingers up at us. Well, the “Wrecking Crew” have arrived – that’s what we call ourselves, you know. You have this one chance to stop your life being reduced to rubble – do you understand?’
Hargrave nodded.
‘And if you think you can kill me and everything will be just fine – think again. Anything happens to me and my team will kill your wife and children in front of you, tie you to one of these lovely wooden beams and burn the house to the ground with you in it. You give me Koll, you get your life back.’
Tom stood up. ‘Midnight on Sunday, Hargrave.’
Before leaving the house, Barth opened the electronic gates, and then they climbed into the car and drove out.
‘Have you really got a team called the “Wrecking Crew” that do those things, Sir?’
Tom glanced sideways at her. ‘You have a strange idea of the police, Barth.’
***
Scylla stared at the colour picture of an attractive woman in her early twenties sitting on the bank of a river or lake. She had ginger hair in a bob cut, and was wearing a sleeveless blue-patterned dress, which had been pushed up to reveal long white legs.
‘Who are you, Chloe?’ she said out loud.
She typed “Chloe, April 2009” into the search engine, but after looking through the sites on the first page she realised that it was a pointless exercise.
Next, she hacked into the CCTV system in Wollensbrook for last Sunday morning, but couldn’t find anything remotely interesting near Gilbert’s house in Kingsfield. Yes, there were a stream of cars moving in both directions along the main road in front of Hoddesdon Methodist Church, but because it was Sunday it didn’t help her at all.
‘Yoo-hoo!’ came through the letterbox.
‘Fuck’s sake!’ she muttered. All she wanted was some peace and quiet.
‘It’s me.’
‘The fucking whole world knows it’s you, Honeybee,’ she said under her breath.
She closed her laptop and walked along the hallway.
‘Hello,’ she said, as she opened the door.
‘I knew you were in,’ Honey said as she walked right in. ‘I hadn’t seen you go out at all, so here I am. I didn’t bring anything this time, but . . .’
‘Have you got a car?’
‘Yes I have! It’s one of those Toyota AYGO’s – a nippy little red one. It’s only to keep me mobile. You know, a bit of shopping now and again, visits to friends and to get around. Why?’
‘I need to go to Chelmsford, and I haven’t bought a car yet.’
‘Of course I can drive you to Chelmsford. Anything I can do to help. Are we going shopping?’
‘No. I’m going to look at a road.’
‘How interesting. Any road in particular?’
‘St Margaret’s Road – behind the prison.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘I can’t tell you. Remember, I said I worked for the government?’
Honey winked. ‘Say no more. Are we going now?’
‘No time like the present, I suppose.’
‘Okay, I’ll just go and get my things. Come over in a minute.’
‘Thanks.’
Honey left, and darted across the road.
Scylla closed the door, walked back to the kitchen, logged off from her laptop and closed it down. After grabbing her coat and her rucksack with her tablet inside, she went to the toilet and then made her way outside.
‘Yoo-hoo!’ Honey said with a wave and opened the door of her car.
As Scylla climbed in, she saw a net curtain move in Honey’s bungalow.
‘I thought you lived alone?’
‘I do.’
‘Then you’ve got burglars.’
‘Oh no! That’s my son, John. He came for a quick visit.’
‘You’ll have to introduce us when we get back.’
She pulled out of her drive. ‘He’ll be gone by then.’
‘Really?’
Chapter Seventeen
Parish had devoured his egg and bacon muffin, and swilled it down with a steaming hot mug of coffee. They’d been surrounded by reporters and other creatures of that ilk, but when it became apparent that neither he nor Doc Riley were going to say anything about the case, they soon drifted away and left the two of them to enjoy their breakfast.
Now, they were standing in the forensic tent in Haystack Grove again, and Doc Riley was kneeling over the body of a young woman whose unrecognisable face was crawling with worms, centipedes and maggots.
‘Throat cut – just like the others,’ she said. ‘I’d say she’s been here for about the same length of time as the previous body at Hoddesdon Cemetery – six to eight weeks. Righ
t, here we go.’ Beginning between the corpse’s bare feet, she moved the bandage scissors up towards the head through the layers of cling film.
‘Have you found anything yet, Toadstone?’ Parish said, filling the expectant silence.
‘Sorry.’
‘I had to ask, but I already knew the answer. Don’t you ever get embarrassed?’
‘Why should I?’
‘You’re a forensic specialist, and yet you never find any forensic evidence. This is meant to be a partnership where you provide me with the evidential jigsaw pieces, and I . . .’
‘And me,’ Richards chipped in.
‘Yes, and she . . . put those pieces together, but I’m beginning to get the distinct impression that our partnership is unfairly unequal. Without forensic jigsaw pieces, I have to grub around for other bits of evidence that will help me make some sense of what’s happened to these poor women . . .’
‘Don’t listen to him, Paul.’
Camera flashlights exploded as the cling film separated from the putrefied body, which began collapsing inwards once it was exposed to the air.
The message carved into the flesh of the abdomen was:
FRAILTY,
THY NAME IS WOMAN
‘Well, Toadstone?’ Parish said.
‘Hamlet, Act I, scene 2, line 146.’
‘So, what does it mean?’
‘I . . .’
‘Hamlet Hill,’ Richards blurted out. ‘We did Hamlet at school.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Toadstone said. ‘Well done, Mary. It’s beyond Dobb’s Weir, and goes through Roydon Hamlet.’
Doc Riley stood up. ‘Okay, everybody out while we slip the body into a bag.’
They moved outside.
‘This isn’t working,’ Parish said.
Richards peered at him. ‘What isn’t?’
‘He’s in control.’
‘Who is?’
‘The killer. Keep up, Richards. We’re following the clues from one body to another, but we’re not actually doing anything. We have no leads, no evidence – nothing. We need a new strategy.’
‘Such as?’
‘Let’s go back to the station and toss some ideas about.’
‘What about the body on Hamlet Hill?’ Toadstone asked.
‘You go and find it. The trouble is, we’re wasting our time working out the clues and searching for the bodies. We’ll never find the killer by doing that. I need evidence. I need a marker to point me in the right direction. I need you to find me something that I can use.’
‘You know I’ll try . . .’
‘Stop saying the same old things, Toadstone. You’re meant to be a genius. Well, you’d better start thinking like a genius. What about comparative crime scene analysis. We were meant to find Jade Williams – she was our shoe-in. We would never have found the body at Hoddesdon Cemetery, or this one and the one at Hamlet Hill – if there is a body there – on our own. He’s spent a considerable amount of time abducting and killing these women, having sex with their dead bodies, carving messages into their flesh, wrapping them in cling film and burying them in out-of-the-way places . . .’
Doc Riley appeared behind the technicians who were carrying the corpse zipped up in a body bag.
‘The same goes for you, Doc. I need evidence. I’ll be there for the PM of the second body this afternoon, but I need you to find me something I can use – compare the findings from the post mortems . . .’
‘You don’t think I do that?’
‘I don’t know what you do. All I know is that there’s a man out there who’s killed and sodomised four women – that we know of – and we’re not even close to catching him.’ He turned to Richards. ‘Have you found out where all that cling film came from yet?’
‘Me? You never said . . .’
‘Do I have to tell you everything? It’s about time you started using your initiative and contributing something to the investigation. Unless you’d like me to do it?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Good. Get onto it when we get back to the station. Is someone buying cling film in bulk? Where from? Somebody must know something.’ He turned to the Doc. ‘Have we analysed the cling film?’
‘Forensics do that.’
‘And yet you have it in your lab.’
‘Only because I’m still looking for trace evidence.’
‘Which you haven’t found. And in the meantime, we have a serial killer who’s laughing at us. You and Toadstone had better start talking to each other. Get one of your people onto it, Toadstone.’
He looked round at the three of them. ‘I want something by nine o’clock tomorrow morning – if not before. If you have to work all through the night to get me that something, then so be it. Any questions?’
There were none.
‘Good. Come on, Richards. You’ll be taking root soon.’
As they were walking back to the car Richards said, ‘You’re not in a very good mood, are you?’
‘We’ve found four dead women who’ve been brutalised by a monster who should have been smothered at birth. We’re not trying to catch him before he kills again, because he’s already killed again – and God knows how many times. What’s he doing now, Richards?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘As someone famous used to say, “The game’s afoot”. Has he already finished constructing the game? Has he killed all the women he needs for his body hunt? For all we know, he could be sunning himself on the Costa del Sol now. He’s rolling the dice, and we’re being moved like game pieces. The game will only end when we find the last body. Well, I’m not playing the game by his rules anymore, Richards.’
‘What are we going to do instead?’
‘We’re going to make our own rules.’
‘Oh.’
***
Once he got back to his office he had to deal with papers, phone calls and people for a couple of hours. The few people who did manage to make it past Carrie into his office gave him strange looks when they saw the whiteboard covered by a station flag, and the boxes scattered around the room.
‘Are you moving offices, Sir?’
‘You have something more serious to worry about than the location of my office, Pettigrew.’
‘Sorry, Sir.’
‘Has the cleaner forgotten where your office is, Sir?’
‘If you don’t change your ways, Watkins – you’ll be the cleaner.’
‘Of course, Sir.’
He finished emptying the box that Mrs Elder had let him have, and then began putting it all back again one sheet of paper at a time. Most of it was copies of what he already had, but the only way he could find that out was by examining each piece of paper. The copies of the post mortem reports were the modified versions, and he wondered how no one from the original task force had spotted the altered pages – but then, neither had he. The only reason Sandy Paine had found them was because she’d been looking.
As he riffled through the papers he began making a list of the people on the task force. What made it more difficult was that some were police officers and some were civilians. Also, he had no idea who else might have had access to everything. It occurred to him that whoever had signed for each post mortem report and collected the items belonging to each victim would be the person he needed to talk to, but there was no record of who that person was in the evidence boxes. Whoever had swapped the Page 4s must have done so between the mortuary and the police station. If a report had reached the station, then others on the task force would have seen the unaltered version, and no changes could then have been made.
The list had grown to epic proportions. There were more people in, and attached to the task force, than there were in the Essex Police Force now – nearly. He needed to reduce it down to manageable proportions, and the only way he knew how to do that was by visiting Andrew Pearson again. The old man had wanted to be kept informed, and it would probably do him good to get involved in the case again.
Towards the bottom
of the box he found something that wasn’t a copy of something he already had – a list of four numbers:
8822
7781
1913
2785
His heart rate increased. He’d seen those numbers before – but where? He pulled the station flag off the whiteboard and let it drop to the floor. Of course, they were the numbers that were on the old thick-card train tickets. He rummaged in the Rye evidence boxes and eventually found two second-class train tickets – neither of which had been punched by a ticket inspector:
5143: Rye House to Bishop’s Stortford, which had been in the possession of Maria Jansen – the third victim – on November 1, 1984; and
0107: Cheshunt to Broxbourne, which had been found on Claudia Olsson – the fifth victim – on October 24, 1985.
Was this the connection he’d been looking for? Did the numbers mean that train tickets were found on the other four victims? Was this the evidence that had gone missing between the pathologists and the police station? Of course, the numbers on their own meant nothing. Was it still possible to identify the journey from a ticket number? He was seeing Ernie Compton at the Alf’s Head soon, Ernie was the man to ask. If it was possible, could Ernie identify the British Railway staff who were on the train for the specific journeys? It was asking a lot, but that’s all he had, which was considerably more than he’d had five minutes ago.
It had crossed his mind earlier that the killer and the person who had forged the post mortem Page 4s was the same person, but it was now more likely that he was dealing with two people rather than one. Of course, it was pure speculation – there could be any number of other reasonable explanations. Also, if a train ticket had been deleted from four of the post mortem reports – why alter Page 4 of the other two reports? He had no answer to that discrepancy in his flow of logic. Maybe there was something else that had been deleted from all six reports. Maybe, maybe, maybe . . .