by Mark Dawson
“The name should be familiar to you,” Mack said.
“We had him on possession of child porn,” Archer said.
“And he got off,” Atticus said.
Lynas squinted at the screen. “We’re sure it’s him?”
Fyfe nodded. “We have his DNA on file, and we were able to extract enough to test it. Perfect match.”
There was a murmur of surprise.
“How did he end up there?” Nigel Archer mused.
“We don’t know,” Mack said, “but you can see why Atticus is going to be helpful in this investigation. He ran the Burns case. No one knows him like he does.”
Archer looked over at Atticus. “So? What do you think?”
“Too early to say,” Atticus said.
“A vigilante? The parent of one of the kids he was fiddling with?”
“Possibly. But it doesn’t explain why his body would be found in the same place as the other victims. Unlawful burials in a village where no one is supposed to go. That doesn’t make sense.”
“What?” Lynas turned to Mack. “‘Other victims?’”
Fyfe clicked through a series of images that showed the other sets of remains that had been discovered.
“Victims C, D and E,” he said. “All female. I’m starting the PMs this morning, but they’re all young. Teenagers, like Amy.”
Lynas swore, and others around the table exchanged looks.
“Robbie?” Mack said. “Can you update on the dig?”
“We’ve only excavated a small fraction of the area so far,” Best said. “We’re using radar to map the rest of the churchyard and, although we’re finding evidence of bodies—as we’d expect—they do seem to match the existing plots that we have been able to identify from photographs taken before the graveyard was closed.”
“So you expect to find more, or you don’t?”
“There’s plenty of space for more.”
The atmosphere in the room dipped. Atticus knew why: the officers were mentally striking out any plans that they might have made for when they weren’t on shift.
Archer leaned back in his seat. “So it’s a multiple killer.”
“Or killers,” Atticus corrected.
Archer ignored that and kept his eyes on Mack. “What’s the plan?”
“We need to search Imber,” Atticus said before Mack could speak. “Not just the graveyard. All of it. How did those bodies get out there? Were they driven out there and then buried? Or were they taken to Imber while they were alive and then killed and buried?”
“Motive?”
“They’re all young. Burns was involved in whatever’s been happening there in one way or another. Teenage girls were his preference. The most likely explanation is that the victims were abused and then murdered there. Imber would be perfect for that. It’s miles from anywhere, and there are empty buildings where there would be no chance of being disturbed.”
Mack nodded her agreement. “The graveyard is already covered, but fan out from there and look at the buildings. You’ll need help—go downstairs and speak to Bob Bradley. Borrow some of his uniforms. Speak to the army to get access.”
“Anything we should be looking for in particular?”
“Signs of recent use,” Atticus said. “Doors that have been forced. Padlocks that are missing. You’ll have to cross-reference it all with the army to eliminate anything that they’ve been doing.”
“The military police have assigned a liaison from the Special Investigations Branch,” Mack said. She checked the email that she had received. “Sergeant Matt Shelton. He’s going to base himself in the village.”
“I assume someone’s been looking through the local mispers?” Atticus said.
“That’s me,” Francine Patterson said. “I’m working through them. Nothing yet.”
“Keep at it,” Mack said.
“Yes, boss.”
Archer raised a finger, and Mack indicated that he should speak. “What about local nonces?”
Mack turned to Atticus. “Did Burns ever work with anyone?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Maybe he found someone else with the same tastes,” Archer said. “They worked together until they had a falling-out. The other one tops Burns and buries him with the victims.”
“Atticus?” Mack said.
He shook his head. “That wasn’t the way he went about things. He was a loner. It was a struggle to find anyone who was prepared to admit that they knew him.”
“We don’t have anything else, though, do we?” Archer said. “Must be worth a look.”
Mack turned back to Patterson. “Run another search and look for anything that might connect anyone with previous for sexual offences to what we know about Burns. We’ll also need reader/recorders set up for everything we find. This has to be efficient. There’s going to be a lot of information generated—we can’t have any of it going in the wrong places.”
“No problem, boss.”
“Atticus,” Mack said, “can you take Burns? Check his background and see if there’s anything that we ought to be looking at. See if you can give Francine something to work with.”
Atticus was already well along that path, but he decided to keep that—and the angles he thought were worth pursuing—to himself. “I’ll get on it this morning,” he said, intending to do nothing of the sort.
“What about the press?” asked Best.
“We need to be very aware of the fact that this is going to be a big story. The conference yesterday was already busy—we’ll have to announce the additional bodies soon, and it’ll go through the roof. We’re fortunate that the dig site is in a restricted area. But you will have noticed there are reporters outside the nick this morning. That’s going to be standard from now on, and it’ll get worse when they realise the scope of what we are dealing with. We’ll all have to tread carefully. Goes without saying that nothing leaves these four walls. Nothing. I don’t want to find that anyone’s been talking out of school—Beckton will not be happy if that happens. Neither will I.”
Mack brought the meeting to a close, and the team dispersed to get to work on the tasks that they had been assigned. Fyfe told Mack that he was going to go back to the dig, and the detectives ambled out of the conference room and went back into the office. Mack waited for Atticus at the door.
“Run everything by me,” she said.
“Come on, Mack. I know what I’m doing.”
“Please?”
She knew him too well. Atticus had forgotten how frustrating it could be to have to get approval for everything that he wanted to do. It had driven him to distraction before, and the independence he had found as a freelancer had been one of the things he had enjoyed most of all.
“I’ve put my neck on the line for you,” she said when he didn’t answer.
“I know. You don’t need to worry. I’m not going to do anything that reflects badly on you.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
43
Atticus walked back to the office. Bandit greeted him at the door, and Atticus ruffled the dog’s fur before going over to his chair and waking his computer. He navigated to the folder where he had stored the information that he had gathered about Alfred Burns. He had obsessed about him for so long that he had memorised the details of his life, but he wanted to refresh himself.
It was all there: transcripts of the interviews that he had conducted, photographs of Burns’s photographic studio where Atticus suspected that he had conducted most of his crimes, and a detailed biography that he himself had written. He clicked through everything until he found the pictures that had been taken of Burns on his arrest. He flicked through the mugshots, photographs of the suspect staring into the camera with the smugness of a man who was confident that his wit and guile would be more than a match for the provincial officers who would try to prove his guilt. Atticus recalled that contemptuous sneer; he had managed to wipe it off Burns’s face during the interrogatio
n, but it had only been temporary. Burns’s disdain had returned after he had been acquitted, and his scornful expression had haunted Atticus’s sleep ever since.
Because he knew: Burns would have been emboldened by his escape and would have returned to his perversions with the confidence that he was beyond the reach of the police.
But now he was dead.
Atticus had to find out what had happened.
He opened the biography. He had written ten pages following Burns’s arrest and had continued to add to it as he had discovered additional information after the acquittal. It was thirty pages long now.
Burns was born in Surbiton in 1957, one of a pair of illegitimate twins who had never met his father. His mother was religious and had been so ashamed of her boys’ birth that she had tried to have them adopted before emigrating to Australia to escape the stigma. The adoption never took place and, instead, Alfred and Derek were placed with foster parents.
The young Alfred was a loner who showed aggressive tendencies with the few friends that he had. He was bullied by children who were older than him, and reflected that behaviour onto those who were younger. Both twins had been abused by their foster parents and, after their deaths, the boys had been transferred to a children’s home, where Alfred had subsequently been abused by a male member of staff. Derek Burns was less intelligent than his brother, but, lacking Alfred’s inflated opinion of himself, was more apt to conform and at least leave school with qualifications. Alfred decided that school was beneath him and left with nothing and no prospects. There had been the idea of getting into photography, but without the money to set himself up, and with nothing else available to him, he had joined the Royal Green Jackets in 1976.
His first tour of Northern Ireland was in 1979, patrolling the streets of Ballymurphy. There were two subsequent tours, concluding with a final tour in Londonderry from 1982 to 1984. It was brought to an end—together with his army career—at a bar in Ballykelly when an INLA bomb exploded, killing seventeen people and leaving him badly injured. His leg was shredded by shrapnel and was amputated a day later. A medical discharge followed, and thereafter began the unravelling of his life.
Burns had been based at the garrison in Tidworth and, familiar with the area, he moved to Salisbury. There had been a number of jobs: an administrative position with the Ministry of Defence, a job at the council allocating funds to local groups, a short-lived business as a handyman and gardener. He had nurtured his interest in photography and, armed with a hard-won medical payout following his discharge, had eventually set himself up as someone who could take pictures of family events, portraits and the like.
He had been arrested in 2019 after the National Crime Agency received intelligence from abroad that the IP address associated with Burns’s computer had been using encrypted services to download indecent images of children. Burns admitted after his arrest that he had always been interested in deviant pornography, although he would not speak of the paedophilic images that had been hidden in a locked folder on his hard drive. He insisted that he had no interest in those images and did not know how they had reached his computer. He argued that they might have been automatically downloaded into his system as part of other downloads, or as a result of the actions of others, suggesting in particular that people he met in chat rooms had occasionally posted indecent images. He also admitted to downloading packages of what he believed to be adult pornography, and suspected that some of the criminal images had arrived from those downloads.
His arguments did not prevent him from being charged. He appeared for trial in the Magistrates Court and pleaded not guilty. His defence relied upon a computer expert who stated that it was impossible to say who had created the images. No one could prove when the images had been created, and it was clear that nothing in their titles suggested their content. The Crown’s expert was cross-examined and admitted that the computer was not password protected and that, in principle, it was impossible to know who had made the images and when they had been made. The judge doubted the strength of the evidence that had been adduced, and Burns was acquitted.
Atticus had been furious. He knew that Burns had benefitted from errors made by the prosecution, and that he was as guilty as sin. The case that he had spent so much time building had been botched, but that wasn’t the reason for his frustration. It was because he knew that the charges laid were not commensurate with the real depth of Burns’s depravity. He was convinced that Burns was guilty of more than just possessing the images; he believed that he had been making them, too. Atticus was sure that Burns had taken illicit photographs of the girls who passed through his studio. He had inspected the changing rooms in minute detail and found holes in the walls and floor that he suspected had been made in order to accommodate hidden lenses. But there was no evidence beyond the holes, and, without more, there were no charges that could be brought.
That was not the extent of Atticus’s suspicions. There had been reports in Salisbury for more than five years of a man who had been assaulting teenage girls. The suspect had always been careful; he struck only when there were no witnesses, in areas that did not have CCTV coverage, and obscured his face with scarves wrapped around his nose and mouth. Atticus had reviewed those cases and had been struck by a fact that had appeared in all the descriptions of the suspect: he was said to walk with a limp. That obviously wasn’t enough to pursue a case against Burns, but Atticus knew.
It was him.
He knew, too, that predators like Burns progressed up a ladder of offending: they started at the bottom, with porn; they graduated to taking their own pictures of their victims; and then, when that wasn’t enough, they began to be more active in their offending. Eventually, when repetition dulled the thrill of the illicit, they escalated further.
Atticus had known where that would lead, and had not been prepared to risk the death of a child because he had not been able to nail Burns.
Now, though?
Burns was dead, laid to rest in a graveyard with the bodies of four young women.
And Atticus needed to know why.
He opened the list of Burns’s friends and family. There were precious few of the former, and, with both foster parents dead and his birth parents untraceable, Atticus was left with Alfred’s brother.
He looked up Derek Burns’s address and decided to pay him a visit.
44
Derek Burns lived in Idmiston, a village to the north of Salisbury. Atticus put Bandit in the back of the car and drove north, arriving at eleven o’clock. The town had grown over the years, swollen by its association with the military, and the village had been absorbed into it. Burns’s house was in an estate near to All Saints’ Church. The road was a cul-de-sac, climbing a slope to a turning circle that was choked with the cars of those who lived there. Burns’s property was detached, with a garage at the front of the property, two large windows above it and a white fascia gable. Atticus had checked on Rightmove and saw that the house advertised for just over £1,000 a month.
Atticus parked alongside and was about to get out when he noticed a man leading a dog toward the open fields to the north. The dog was a chocolate Labrador, and Atticus recognised him from the time he had interviewed his owner during the Burns inquiry.
Atticus got out and went around to let Bandit out. He clipped the dog’s lead to his collar, locked the car and followed Burns and his dog.
Bandit tugged at his lead, but Atticus held him back to give Derek the opportunity to get out of the estate. They continued north until they reached an open field. There was a metal gate that the Labrador was able to wriggle underneath. Atticus took out his phone and quickly recorded video as Derek clambered over the gate and hopped down into the mud on the other side. Atticus unclipped Bandit and climbed into the field himself, catching up with Derek as the two dogs sprinted toward each other and exchanged excited barks.
“Lovely dog,” Atticus said to Derek.
“And yours.”
The two dogs raced away into t
he field. Atticus smiled at Derek and waited for his expression to sour with distaste.
It didn’t take long.
“I remember you,” Derek said. “You’re police.”
“That’s right,” he said, not seeing any reason to correct the misapprehension—which was, after all, nearly correct.
“Not again,” he complained. “This is about Alfred?”
“It is.”
“It was bad enough last time. You harassed him. You harassed me.”
“That’s really Alfred’s fault, isn’t it?”
“They found him not guilty.”
“And we both know that was ridiculous.”
“No,” Derek said, “we don’t. It was a fit-up, from start to finish.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that. I need to ask you a few extra questions.”
“Am I obliged to answer them?”
“No. But I think you’ll want to cooperate.”
“No, I don’t think I will.”
Derek set off, following the edge of the field as the dogs continued to gambol around each other.
Atticus followed. “When was the last time you saw Alfred?”
“Haven’t you been listening? I’m not talking to you.”
“I’m not investigating Alfred this time.”
“Bullshit. I remember you—you were the one who had it in for him.”
“Really, I’m not.”
“Do you think I was born yester—”
“Alfred’s dead.”
That stopped Derek in his tracks. “What?”
“He was murdered.”
“No,” he said. “That can’t be right.”
“Sometime in the last couple of months. He was buried on Salisbury Plain. We dug up his body on Wednesday. It hasn’t been announced to the press yet, but I doubt it’ll be long before they find out.”
Derek’s mouth hung open. “I don’t… I mean… I mean, who would murder him?”