“Abusing his power, maybe?” Benson’s eyebrows rose up his forehead.
“Even if it was an abuse of power, she didn’t do this, Tom. You’ve got to be looking at that Tony fella for this. He likes axes, remember? And because of… this.” He waved an arm in case Benson hadn’t seen the carnage. “There’s so much energy. So much strength needed. Look at the overturned bed. Look at the damage on Sidmouth’s body.”
Benson did a mini-shake of his head, the kind of thing you’d do if you were organising your thoughts, lining them up until they made more sense. “Why would he do it?”
“Framing her, just like the other murders. And if he was Jessica’s Offender Manager, it’s the perfect murder to frame her for.”
“He didn’t frame her for Marchant’s murder.”
“No. He didn’t.” Eddie slid in to a short period of thought, and then said, “I wonder if it all started with Marchant; this thing between Tony and Jessica. Tony killed Marchant for messing up Jessica’s life, and she doesn’t like it because it brings suspicion on her – obviously.”
“And you think Tony’s worried she’ll grass him up if we put too much pressure on her?”
“Makes sense. And so he’s killing her enemies, making it look like she did it.”
“So she gets sent down again,” Benson said.
Eddie nodded. “It’s a decent theory.”
Benson folded his arms. “But why wait all these years to kill Marchant?”
Eddie blew out a sigh, and shrugged. “No idea.”
Benson slid the mask back on and focused on the scene. “Why the hell kill the mother?”
Eddie stood, rubbed his face with the back of his gloved hand, saw the shine of fresh grease there and went to change his gloves. “The mother couldn’t keep quiet; that’s a given, mate. When she hears her boy screaming his tits off, she’s shitting herself – probably quite literally. All she can do is whimper. Offender goes to see what the noise is, finds her on the bog.”
“Being on the bog is offensive is it?”
“No, but no self-respecting murderer leaves witnesses alive. You never watched The Sopranos?”
“I preferred Morse.” Benson crouched down. “What footwear marks have you found?”
Eddie shouted, “Kenny?”
“What?”
“Kind of footwear marks on the bathroom floor?”
There was a pause, then, “Zig-zags.”
“Nike Cortez?”
“We have a footwear bureau for identifying them.”
“Could it be Cortez, Kenny?”
“You’re the saddo who knows his footwear patterns, mate. To me they’re just zig-zags.”
Eddie turned back to Benson. “They’re Cortez. And in here, too.”
“You saw them?”
Eddie pointed the torch beam directly at a good right shoe impression in the dust where the bed had been. “There.” He stood, widened the beam out, and, keeping away from the path trodden by the offender, made his way towards the victim. He shone the torch on Sidmouth’s face, at the shoe-shaped bruise across his cheek, and then looked back at Benson.
Benson groaned and stood up. “You’re shitting me?”
Eddie said nothing.
Benson shook his head. “It’s her. Look at the size of it!”
“Even for a copper, that’s a fucking big conclusion to jump to. It doesn’t suit you. You’re usually more cautious than this.”
Benson pulled his hood down, and his cheeks were flushed red. “Same size as the shoe at Doc Bolton’s scene, wouldn’t you say?”
“It is. And I happen to think that Tony was at Bolton’s murder.”
“Bollocks, Eddie. You said yourself that everyone at Bolton’s scene would spot who had killed him, remember?”
Eddie nodded. “Well, the jury is still out on that one.”
“Tell me. You think she killed Bolton, but Tony killed everyone else, right?”
Eddie breathed deeply. “No. I originally thought she killed Bolton because there were no footwear marks leading to the coat stand where her coat was found hanging.”
“So?”
“So it meant that Bolton took it from her and hung it up to dry. He’s not going to take a woman’s coat off a burly tramp, is he?”
“And now?”
“And now I think Tony took off his shoes and hung the stolen coat up there himself once Bolton was dead.”
“That still doesn’t explain the small, female-sized Nike Cortez, does it?”
Eddie shrugged.
“Does it?”
“No. It doesn’t. Okay?”
“But you still think it’s Tony?”
Eddie nodded. “A hunch.”
“You’re a man of science, but you’re relying on a hunch? You cretin. And don’t forget she had a knife under her mattress while we were there. She’s not as innocent as she makes out.”
“Look, we’re just going around in circles here.” Eddie followed him out, dropped the gloves into a black bin bag, and flapped his hands, trying to dry the sweat off. “She was afraid. It was there in case Tony got rough.”
“You’re supposed to be impartial.”
“And you’re supposed to be open-minded.”
Benson sighed. “Isn’t that the same thing? Anyway, never mind, just hurry up in there, I’ve organised officers to recover his computer and whatever other shit he’s got.”
Eddie’s phone rang. He split the tear in his suit leg higher and pulled the phone from his pocket. ‘Weismann’ flashed on the screen; he pressed the green button.
“Hello? Hello, can you hear me? Fucking phones.” He shouted to Kenny. “Back in a minute, mate, I have to take this.”
Eddie and Benson parted company in the hallway. Benson went out to order OSU to search all the bins up and down the street, and Eddie called Weismann back.
There were clicks and crackles, but eventually he heard Weismann just clearly enough to catch something like an address before his voice became unreadable. There was an anticipation that hurried Eddie out of the house, already searching his pockets for the van keys, but someone in a white suit was blocking his way.
The suit smiled at him, and Eddie’s attention was divided, but it landed firmly on Weismann’s side when heard the word ‘dead’. “What? Who’s dead? Weismann, I can’t hear you.”
Eddie shut the phone off, and growled, thoughts spinning – an address, a death. And then the suit was there again, holding a hand out. She was smiling.
“Sally?” Sally Pemberton, the biologist who always seemed to gravitate towards Eddie’s jobs these days. Good-looking lass, he thought, but a pain in the arse. Eddie looked at her smile, looked down at her petite hand, and tried to work out if he should shake or not. He decided not – it wasn’t fucking LinkedIn. “Who requested you? I didn’t request you.”
“Erm…” Sally put her hand away as though it was an absurdity.
“Hurry up, love. I have another death to get to.” Eddie stared off over her shoulder, wondering which one was dead: Troy or Nicki. He could feel anger at the whole messy situation forcing its way down his trachea.
“Nicki,” she said. “Nicki Murphy. She requested me.”
He looked down at her, noted the dismay on her face, felt bad about it, but felt disinclined to lift her mood when his own had just turned so fucking sour. “Follow me.” He, trudged back up the stone steps and into the hallway. He pointed up the stairs. “Don’t tread on that one, the one with the blood on it. Right?”
She nodded.
“Kenny, put a marker on this damaged step.”
“Righto.”
“And the biologist is here.” He heard Kenny mumble; ‘wasting my time’ was definitely in there somewhere.
“Seems no one’s very keen on seeing me today.”
“Try being me, love. Even people in my office have an injunction out against me.” Eddie looked at her, and almost felt guilty. “Don’t take it personally; you lot just tend to fuck up people’s da
ys, that’s all. Comes with the territory.” And then up the stairs to Kenny, he shouted. “I got to go, mate. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that piece of shit before.”
Chapter Seventy
Eddie sat in his van as dusk painted the street a darker hue and stole a layer of colour. He was lost in thought as he waited for the copper to find the keys to a beat car that was blocking the road.
Usually he would have been bouncing off the ceiling for them to get the car moved, and would even have considered pushing it away with the van. But right now he felt disinclined to rush to the address that Weismann had given him. In fact, he felt like driving straight past the address and terminating his journey somewhere on the coast; Whitby, perhaps, or Filey. Somewhere quiet, somewhere he could just disappear.
He didn’t want to know who had died, and he didn’t want to know how. It was someone else’s turn for all that shit, thank you very much – his shoulders weren’t wide enough to accommodate anyone else’s shit these days. Irrespective of who it was, he wasn’t sure he could cope with the inevitable fall-out of another in-house death, especially if it was an in-house murder. He’d never rest again if that had happened.
He peered out of the side window, thumbs running circles around each other as he waited. The death house was to his right. He could see bursts of light through a frosted window as Kenny fired the flash in the bathroom. Eddie peered to his left. There was a dirt track that led nowhere at the end of a terrace of houses. Although the light was dimming, he could see that at the back of the dead-end lane was a chain-link fence with a growth of straw-coloured grass and weeds at its feet. Beyond it was a field.
But the thing Eddie found interesting was the streetlight. There wasn’t one. The nearest streetlight behind him was fifty yards uphill on the left; the nearest one in front was forty yards downhill and on the right pavement.
That little hole was unlit. That little hole was black.
This job came in this morning, but it would have happened last night, overnight, probably. It would have been pitch black in there. And there was no excess parking on this street – you had to breathe in just to walk on the fucking pavement. But if you were parking a car, or prepping for a bit of a murder or two, it’d be good to have a jumping-off point, wouldn’t it? A place to come back to afterwards if it had all gone according to plan.
Eddie climbed out of the van, clicked on his torch as the copper waved a set of keys at him from across the road. “Five minutes,” Eddie said.
“I’ve just—”
“Shut up.” The copper sulked and was about to walk away, when Eddie said, “Don’t you dare disappear. Just wait for me.” Eddie walked through the moths flitting back and forth in the light from the van’s headlamps and stood on the footpath pointing his light into the dark track.
Around him, the noises of the scene disappeared. The incessant police radio chatter, the sounds of distant sirens, traffic on the nearby roads, all faded away. Eddie was in the zone.
He cast the beam low across the silty, damp mud; there were footwear marks. Zig-zags, as Kenny would have said. A concentration of them near the gable end of the terraced house, and more coming and going towards the chain-link fence. Had he stashed something there, the murderer? There were no tyre tracks, so he’d come and gone on foot. But the ‘foot’ was odd. It was small – female-sized, like those at Doc’s scene, like those across the road there inside Sidmouth’s house.
No way could they be Tony’s footwear impressions. Too small.
And Eddie found that a bit sad. When he looked at Jess, he saw someone afraid, someone scared to open their door, someone whose sleep was as thin and broken as his own. She wasn’t a killer; she was a victim. So these footwear marks came as a shock, and Eddie considered them: Either Jessica Ripley was a better actress than he’d given her credit for – had completely beaten Eddie’s bullshit detector, or another female was involved.
There was another alternative: Tony had tiny feet.
Eddie sighed; felt pulled in two directions at once, and was unable to determine the correct path to take.
The torchlight picked out something else. A faint red stain on a clump of grass, and next to it an impression in the soil. The impression was wedge-shaped, and the red stain was concentrated at the thinnest end of the wedge. So it was an axe. And then, as though the murderer had just let it fall while attending to other matters, there was the impression of a shaft, a handle. It was a hatchet.
Eddie scurried towards the chain-link fence and the shit-coloured grass, avoiding a dog turd by sheer luck and less than an inch. Beyond it was a flattening of the grass where something had been sitting for a while – a bag, perhaps?
The dead-looking grass and the dog turd were of no value, but Eddie closed in on the flattened spot, searching inch by inch. He came up empty.
Back out on the footpath, he took out his phone, and as he waited for an answer he summoned the sulking copper with the keys. “Throw some cordon tape across this gap. CSI will be here soon. Okay?”
There was no response from the copper.
Eddie got in his face. “I said okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. Move your fucking car first.”
There was no reply from Weismann’s phone, so Eddie, now back in his van, rang straight through to divisional CSI control and booked the next available officer. “And make sure they take a soil sample.”
Seatbelt on, cigarette between his lips, Eddie engaged gear and set off for the address Weismann had given him. His nerves prickled the closer he got.
And when he arrived – a smart block of flats with its own semi-enclosed car park – the place was alive with police vehicles, blue lights flashing on some, making Eddie squint. Fire crews were in attendance, several ambulances too, and the noise was enormous. Among the vehicles were two or three from news networks, and a Peugeot he recognised as belonging to Weismann. He parked the van as close as he could, about fifty yards away, then lit another cigarette, locked the van and walked towards the thing he’d been dreading all day.
Here, at the roadside, crowds of people gathered; in the flats, windows were open, curtains tied back as people watched the arse-end of this circus. The juicy bit, of course, was around the back. Eddie dodged around people, avoiding eye contact, and made his way to the outer cordon.
There were the obligatory kids on bikes poking fun at the emergency services and there were the dealers keeping an eye on things from a safe distance. Eddie approached the cordon and spoke with a PCSO who was on scene guard, and on edge.
For a change, the lift smelled not of piss but of lavender or jasmine. He didn’t know which, but it was a pleasant surprise. The pleasure didn’t last long; the red digit changed to a 6 and the door slid open. Eddie stepped out and the cold wind slapped his face. More cordon tape flapped, more police radio traffic echoed around the concrete landing.
Divisional CID, already in scene suits, were at the railings peering over, determined to ruin the scene in order to feel a frisson that only a one-hundred-foot drop seemed able to give.
Pretty soon they would be officially handing the scene over to MCU, the process probably already underway, and CSI from another force would fingerprint the railing being leaned on by these fine detectives right now.
Eddie shook his head at their tourist mentality.
“You want to go in?” The PCSO’s hand was poised on the tape, ready to lift it for Eddie.
“No. Thanks,” he said. He turned to leave, eyes fixed on the lift’s call button when something shiny caught his eye. Beneath the hydrant, tucked away into its own concrete alcove, was something flashing at him. The flashing was a Wrigley’s chewing gum wrapper; a foil one that acted like a tiny mirror as it flicked around in the alcove’s breeze. “Troy. You stupid fucker.”
Chapter Seventy-One
Back on the ground, Eddie wove through the melee and found himself staring at a sheet of grey pla
stic held to the ground by a brick on each corner. There was a body-sized bulge in its centre, and next to it was a hoodie; it was blue with a white stripe down the centre.
Feeling despondent, Eddie made his way around the front of the building. Someone nearby said, “Oi.”
Eddie turned around and the blow to his face took him clean off his feet. He landed on his back, shoulders first; his face was on fire, and the wind was knocked out of him. He was disorientated, but felt the thud in his side as the boot went in. He snatched consciousness but things were grey and hazy, the sounds around him coming clear and focused one second and then buzzy, distant the next.
He tried to draw a breath and got nothing other than a hitching in his chest.
There was screaming. He could hear raised voices and the crowd jeering, some women screaming, and when his eyes opened, he could see the PCSO shouting urgently into his radio, and he could see him struggling with a man. And before long, another man in a suit, wearing braces, joined the tussle. Eddie shook his head; it seemed to clear the sound, though his vision was still blurred.
Crawford slapped him around the face. He was on him; he was all teeth like a rabid dog. Eddie could see the tendons in his neck standing out, and his eyes were wide, fierce, and his fists were pummelling the air right in front of Eddie’s face, his claws trying to grab Eddie by the throat. Lips pulled back, hatred gushing. Crawford was screaming like an animal on the kill. No; like an animal wounded.
Eddie realised the scene tape was there for Nicki.
But the thing Eddie noticed – the only thing that he really noticed – were the tears flicking from Crawford’s overflowing eyes, dripping from his chin and from the end of his nose as he swung his head around, and how they shimmered with blue lights.
Tears everywhere. Pain everywhere.
Chapter Seventy-Two
There were people banging on the walls when he opened his eyes. Someone was standing over him. For an awful moment, Eddie thought they were going to beat him to death, but as his vision cleared he managed to work out that the fuzzy person blocking the light from the ceiling was dressed in a green paramedic’s uniform, and the banging was kids throwing stones at the ambulance.
The Death of Jessica Ripley Page 27