Deadly Secrets: An absolutely gripping crime thriller

by Robert Bryndza

  ‘Okay,’ said Erika. ‘Does all this have a point?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said McGorry with a grin. Peterson grinned and nodded too.

  ‘Well, get on with it!’

  ‘I also got footage from the train, when she changed at London Bridge. It’s a newer carriage and equipped with CCTV.’ They saw a crowded train carriage from the viewpoint of a camera mounted in the ceiling above the doors, looking down the carriage. ‘There she is, crushed in beside these two guys. Gay, I’m guessing, as they don’t seem to be paying any attention to her.’

  ‘Okay, okay, less of the personal comments.’

  ‘I’m just saying that there are no creeps who seem to be interested in her,’ he clarified, as he ran through the footage on the screen, showing the ten-minute train journey. ‘Okay, here we are at 9.42 p.m., and the carriage empties out at Forest Hill.’

  ‘Is there any footage from TFL of the station?’ asked Erika.

  ‘No. Nothing apart from the platform, and Marissa getting off with the rest of the crowds,’ he said, moving to another short clip.

  ‘Okay, what else do you have for me?’

  ‘This is the best. The school opposite Marissa Lewis’s house on Coniston Road has CCTV on two sides of the playground. One of them shows a view of Marissa Lewis’s front gate.’

  The last video showed half of Marissa’s house, from the gate past the alleyway, and a portion of the street leading up to the junction.

  ‘What’s the time stamp on this?’ asked Erika.

  ‘This video is from 9.40 p.m.’

  He scrolled through the black and white video, showing the empty snow-covered street, and the gate.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Erika, when there was a flash of black at 8.51 p.m.

  ‘A cat jumping up on the gate,’ said McGorry.

  ‘Marissa had a cat,’ said Kay. ‘Beaker, its name is.’

  ‘Did you interview it?’ asked one of the uniformed officers.

  ‘Piss off,’ said Kay.

  ‘Quiet!’ said Erika.

  ‘Here we go,’ said McGorry. A figure in black, wearing a gas mask, walked into shot by the gate, moving carefully and purposefully along in the snow, almost staggering against the slippery surface. It reached the gate and looked up at the house. Then it carried on walking past the house, and stepped into the shadows of the alleyway.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Erika.

  ‘Okay, we run this forward for seven minutes,’ said McGorry, as the time stamp on the video whirred past. ‘There, you can just see Marissa Lewis arriving home.’

  Marissa appeared at the gate. The room fell silent. Most of them had already seen the video, but the impact of it was just as striking the second time. Marissa opened the gate and went through, vanishing in the shadows of the front garden. Ten seconds later, the figure in the gas mask moved out of the shadows and approached the gate, carrying a long knife. It moved quickly through the front gate and was swallowed up by the darkness.

  ‘The camera doesn’t pick up anything that happened in the front garden,’ said McGorry. ‘Four minutes later, he comes back out.’

  ‘Are you sure there’s nothing?’ asked Erika.

  ‘I’ve watched it several times, slowed down. There’s nothing; the camera doesn’t pick up anything.’

  He moved the video forward, as the figure came out, carrying the dripping knife. It stopped in the gate and looked back into the shadows.

  ‘He wipes it with a cloth, conveniently taken from his pocket. He stashes the knife in the pocket with the cloth, and then immediately turns to his right, leaving the shot.’ The team around Erika was silent. ‘I’ve lost him after that; there’s no CCTV in the residential area. He could have got in a car out of shot, or gone into a house; we don’t know.’

  ‘Run it back again,’ said Erika. She paused the video where the man in the gas mask emerged from the gate, and for a moment there was a clear view of the mask. She got up and went over to her desk, where she had a copy of the note sent to Joseph Pitkin. She held it up against the screen, looking at the hand-drawn gas mask in black biro ink.

  ‘Does this look like a similar kind of gas mask?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know, it’s perhaps an old military gas mask,’ said McGorry.

  ‘We need to go back over the e-fit images given by the people who were attacked. And if there aren’t any, we need to go back and get them to work with an e-fit artist. Also, now we have this CCTV with the date and time stamp we could concentrate on a new door-to-door in the houses overlooking Marissa’s, in case anyone saw anything. This is great work.’

  ‘I was working with Kay,’ he said, grinning at her. One of the phones started ringing in the background and Moss hurried over to answer it.

  ‘This is good work, both of you.’

  ‘Boss,’ said Moss, holding her hand over her phone. ‘There’s been another attack by the man in the gas mask, in West Norwood, early this morning. A young lad on his way to work.’

  Thirty-Seven

  Jason Bates had been taken by police to the SARC, the Sexual Assault Referral Centre in Camberwell. Erika drove alone to the centre, and arrived there late afternoon. It was a small, nondescript building off the main road. Erika was met by a big burly police officer with a thick beard at an unmarked door at the side of the building.

  ‘Have you managed to take any evidence?’ asked Erika.

  ‘Yes, he’s already been examined; we’ve taken swabs and samples.’

  ‘Did you manage to get anything workable?’

  ‘Blood.’

  Erika nodded; she couldn’t let her enthusiasm show.

  ‘Can I talk to him?’

  ‘The SIO of this case is with him now; he’s been through a terrible ordeal. He’s deeply traumatised.’

  ‘I know, but the murder case I’m working on has just crossed over with this.’

  He nodded. ‘Wait here a moment, please.’

  Erika took a seat on a small bench in the long corridor. The officer went through a door marked ‘Initial Room’, which was a forensically safe examination room: a sterile space with wipe-clean plastic surfaces so that there could be no possible contamination of evidence.

  Erika looked around the corridor. There were pictures of a sunny meadow and of a few sacks of brightly coloured oriental spices that had been hung in an attempt to dilute the clinical atmosphere. The door opened and the police officer emerged with DCI Peter Farley, a middle-aged man with greying hair. Erika showed her warrant card.

  ‘Hi Erika, good to meet you,’ he said. She followed him into the small room, which again had been unsuccessfully disguised with posters and pot plants.

  A nurse sat with a young lad who had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. His bare feet poked out of the bottom of a long paper gown. There was an untouched cup of tea beside him. He was slight, with strawberry-blond hair and pale eyebrows. His left eye bloomed with red where a blood vessel had burst. His lip was cut and his nose was crusted with blood. His eyes had black bruises. He shifted in his seat painfully.

  ‘This is Erika; she’s my colleague,’ said Peter.

  Jason stared ahead and nodded.

  ‘What can you tell me about the person who did this?’ asked Erika.

  Jason swallowed with difficulty and winced. ‘He was tall. I’m five nine. I think he was taller than me. He wore a gas mask.’

  ‘Can you describe it?’

  Erika listened, waiting for him to mention the white squares painted on the breathing drum. He did. He went on to describe what had happened, how the attacker’s mask had almost come off his head and how he’d cut himself on the glass in the door frame.

  ‘This is where we got the DNA blood swab,’ said Peter.

  Jason went on, ‘He, he forced himself on… He…’ A tear formed in his bloodshot eyes and ran down his cheek. Erika went to take his hand but he pulled it away. ‘He put his, the mask, close to my face. I saw his eyes, they were dark and small, and the whites… I could really see the
whites around his eyes. He then… He raped me.’ He started to gag and retch and bent over and gripped his stomach. The nurse pulled out a tissue and gave it to him to wipe his mouth.

  ‘We should stop there,’ she said to Erika.

  ‘No,’ said Jason, wiping his mouth and scrunching the tissue up into a ball. ‘I want to talk to her.’

  The nurse nodded.

  ‘Thank you, Jason. I can understand this is hard for you,’ said Erika.

  ‘You don’t understand… The sick bastard put on a condom.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘He was well-built, strong.’ He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head, not believing that this was happening.

  Erika looked over at Peter. She wanted to know if they had been able to get any semen swabs, but he shook his head.

  ‘Is there anything else? Anything, however small?’ asked Erika.

  ‘He was dressed all in black. A long winter jacket. He had on black boots, the mask. Thick leather gloves… When he took one of the gloves off, he touched me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘My throat. He touched my neck to feel my pulse…’

  ‘What about the gas mask, how would you describe it?’ asked Erika.

  ‘It was a gas mask. I dunno, like the ones you see people wore in the war. There were these white squares on the breathing bit, the round bit where his breath was coming out…’ Jason shook his head and scrunched up his eyes. ‘It was only just getting light. But there was this smell, his breath when he got close. It was like a chemical smell, like industrial, or nail polish. I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s okay. Thank you, Jason.’

  * * *

  When Erika came back outside, she put in a call to Moss, who was back in the incident room. She relayed the information, and that they had a DNA sample from blood on a piece of glass.

  ‘I want a DNA sample taken from Don Walpole. Send an officer round with a DNA kit to get a mouth swab.’

  ‘You checked out the Matrix club with Peterson last night. How did that go?’ asked Moss.

  Erika briefly outlined what had happened and that she’d gone to see Mrs Fryatt and Don about the earrings.

  ‘I’ve just been checking over everything from forensics, and what the police recovered from Marissa Lewis’s house, and there are no earrings. I also had Tania ask Mandy Trent, but she wasn’t aware of Marissa having a hugely expensive pair of diamond earrings,’ said Moss.

  ‘Okay. Oh, if you check out my desk, there’s my answering machine.’

  ‘Okay, not sure I understand why you brought that to work?’

  Erika explained what had happened with the Evening Standard and then the strange message late at night.

  ‘There are more than enough weirdos in the world who probably have my number and want to give me a fright. Can you just run the number? It’s from a mobile; I’ve left it on my desk.’

  ‘Sure. One more thing, Boss. University College Hospital called. Ivan Stowalski is still unconscious. His wife, Ezra, arrived this morning and she’s there with him.’

  ‘Okay, I’m halfway there. I’ll go over and see what I can get out of her. It will be interesting to hear her side of things. Keep me posted.’

  Thirty-Eight

  Ezra Stowalski was a small woman with short fair hair, and a kind, careworn face. Ivan had been given a room on the top floor of the hospital, and when Erika arrived, a nurse was taking some blood from his arm. Erika waited until she was finished and then produced her warrant card and introduced herself.

  ‘I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened,’ said Erika.

  ‘Why didn’t you leave him?’ Ezra said, becoming angry. ‘Why did you have to break the door down and save him?’ She had a slight accent, but pronounced every word correctly.

  ‘I’m trained to save lives.’

  Ezra looked down at Ivan. His skin was grey, and he was hooked up to so many machines, tubes and wires. His chest rose and fell with a hiss of a ventilator. Ezra looked away from him and closed her eyes, her face registering pain.

  ‘I didn’t know anything. About him leaving with her. How stupid am I?’

  ‘You’re not stupid.’

  ‘Are you trained to humour people, too?’

  ‘I’m not usually very good at it. Something must be going wrong today.’

  Ezra smiled.

  ‘Did you know he was having an affair?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did things start?’

  ‘She put a leaflet through the letter box, asking if anyone wanted any cleaning or ironing done. Her mother has never looked after her. I felt sorry for her. I thought it was admirable that she wanted to work her way out of her situation. I asked if she’d like to come and do some ironing…’ She looked over at Ivan. ‘I never thought that he would go for a young girl.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A year ago, maybe more.’

  ‘Did you confront them?’

  ‘No. I was scared to, and I was happy he wasn’t… that he didn’t want anything from me. We’d been sleeping in separate bedrooms for some time. I just buried my head in the sand. Although, I never thought he would leave me, or plan to leave me so callously. The cheating I could deal with; it was the lies and the lack of respect for our life together that hurts me.’

  ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘My wedding vows,’ she said, looking back at him. Although, she didn’t sound too convinced.

  ‘What was your husband doing on Christmas Eve, after 8 p.m.?’

  ‘He was upstairs in his office, going over paperwork. I was packing.’

  ‘Why did you leave so late to drive up north to your parents? You left around 11 p.m.’

  ‘How do you know what time we left?’

  ‘We have your car on CCTV, at 11.30 p.m. leaving the congestion charge zone, and heading up north.’

  ‘You think he killed her?’ asked Ezra, her eyes wide. Erika didn’t answer.

  ‘Where was Ivan between 8 p.m. and 10.30 p.m.?’

  ‘He told me he had to do some work.’

  ‘On Christmas Eve?’

  ‘His job, his work, it never stops. He’s always having to work in the evenings and at weekends.’

  ‘Where were you packing?’

  ‘Upstairs in our bedroom.’

  ‘And where does Ivan work, when he’s at home?’

  ‘In the kitchen.’

  ‘Were you up and down the stairs as you were packing?’ asked Erika.

  ‘No. I finished what I had to do by nine. I stayed upstairs and watched TV in our bedroom.’

  ‘Did you see Ivan working in the kitchen between nine p.m. and ten thirty p.m.?’

  ‘No. I just waited upstairs… I might have fallen asleep, I was dozing. That’s around the time she was killed, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, we think so.’

  ‘Was there anything out of the ordinary about Ivan that night? And is there anything else you want to tell me. Was he a jealous type? Was he obsessive about who you were friends with, who you spoke to?’

  ‘No. Not with me, anyway…I thought it was just a silly affair. I didn’t know he was so serious about her. That he wanted a future with her. That he loved her. Perhaps he did kill her. It just goes to show, you don’t really know the people who you share your life with.’ She put out her hand and touched the blankets, pulling them up around Ivan’s chin. ‘He doesn’t deserve to wake up. Is that bad, that I think that?’ she said. Again, Erika didn’t answer.

  Thirty-Nine

  McGorry rang the bell of Don Walpole’s house just after 5 p.m. He was flanked by two uniformed officers, one of whom carried a portable DNA kit. The road was quiet, and the snow was melting, leaving the road with a grey slush. He leaned up and rang the bell again, hearing it chime from inside the house. He stepped back and went to the window, peering through the curtain.

  ‘No one in,’ he said. The two officers shifted on their feet in the cold. McGorry took out his mobile phone and tried the number they had for D
on. It went straight to the answer machine. McGorry noticed an old man standing at the end of his front path a few doors down, smoking, with an ashtray balanced on the gatepost. McGorry came out of Don Walpole’s front garden and approached him.

  ‘Do you know the person who lives here?’ he asked. The old man took a drag of his cigarette, his whispering lips making a small ‘O’, then he exhaled, nodding.

  ‘That’s Don and Jeanette.’

  ‘Have you seen them today?’

  ‘They left this afternoon, about an hour or so ago. In a hurry, they were.’

  ‘How can you tell if someone is in a hurry? What do you mean?’

  ‘They was moving fast… And have you seen Jeanette? She’s a big woman. She don’t move fast.’

  ‘Did they say when they were coming back?’

  ‘What do you think this is? People don’t talk to each other. I saw them leave.’

  ‘Did they drive?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Did they have any bags?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shit,’ said McGorry. ‘Thanks.’

  As he went off, the old man lit up another cigarette, and McGorry overheard him mutter, ‘Useless bloody police; takes three of them to knock on a door.’

  Forty

  It was gone six when Erika left the hospital, and she realised, again, that she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all day. She walked to the Starbucks across the road, and joined a long line to grab a sandwich and a cappuccino. It was very busy, and she thought about taking it back to the car, but she felt so exhausted, and it was so cold outside. She just needed ten minutes to sit down and think about the case and all the new developments. Did Ivan have motive to kill Marissa? He certainly felt guilty enough to try and top himself.

  The seats were all full, mostly with kids in their twenties sitting and chatting on their phones, or working away at their computers. At the back, she found a small table, with three big easy chairs dotted around it. A young couple in their teens occupied two of the chairs, and they were holding hands and leaning across to nuzzle and kiss. Shopping bags were piled up on the third chair.