by M K Farrar
Mallory cleared her throat, and Ryan caught her throwing him a wide-eyed stare.
He pulled himself back to professional mode. “So, what are your thoughts?” he asked Nikki.
“Obviously, I’ll be able to tell more once we get the bodies down to the mortuary, but all four members were stabbed, which is most likely the cause of death. The father was stabbed through the left eye socket, causing a massive brain injury. The wife had her throat cut, and it caught the carotid artery, as you can tell from the arc of the blood spatter across the wall and curtains.”
The woman was half on, half off the bed. The blood had turned dark and sticky, indicating several hours had passed since it had been spilled.
“Whoever cut her throat would have been covered in her blood,” Ryan said.
She nodded in agreement. “Yes, I’d say it would have been near impossible to avoid.”
“Can you tell which of them was killed first?”
“At a guess, I’d say the man, purely because he doesn’t appear to have moved from the position he was sleeping in. The woman looks as though she was trying to escape, so she must have seen or heard what was happening to her husband and tried to get away. Unfortunately, she didn’t get very far.”
“They didn’t hear the person coming in?”
“Doesn’t seem that way.”
Ryan took a moment, assessing the rest of the room. There was nothing to suggest this was a burglary gone wrong—no drawers or cupboards had been opened, and the jewellery box on the vanity table remained closed, too. Both the victims had a glass of water sitting on the bedside tables next to them. The woman’s side also had a Kindle.
He noticed something. “Where are their phones?”
“Not here,” Frome said. “We haven’t seen any sign of any mobile phones in any of the rooms.”
“But didn’t the school try to call the parents? And the deceased had texted her friend the night before. If they didn’t have mobile phones, what was she texting on?”
“You think someone took them?”
He twisted his lips. “That’s my assumption but it doesn’t look like a burglary. Why take the phones, and nothing else?”
No one could come up with an answer.
“Show me the children,” he said.
This was the worst part of his job, by far. Adults, he could deal with, no matter how violent or tragic the deaths, but kids triggered him, taking him back to the days when he’d first lost his daughter.
They went to the box room first. Ryan exhaled slowly through his nose and then stepped inside. He almost couldn’t bring himself to look, but he knew he had to. This girl deserved to have a detective who was willing to really see her to work out what had happened, no matter how hard.
If his own daughter, Hayley, had lived, she’d have been around this girl’s age now.
He took a shaky breath and swallowed against the painful knot constricting his throat and turned his face so his colleagues wouldn’t see how badly the girl’s death affected him.
Dulcie Wyndham was slumped against the chest of drawers, a streak of blood running down the painted wood where she must have slid down. Her hair hung over her face, and for that Ryan was grateful. She was in a t-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts, which she must have worn to bed, the items now dark with blood.
“She has several knife wounds to the chest,” Nikki said. “No obvious signs of a struggle or that she fought back.”
Ryan shook his head in dismay. “Jesus, poor kid. She must have heard something going on in her parents’ room. Did she try and hide in here? Why didn’t she run?”
“Maybe because she knew her attacker?” Mallory suggested.
Ryan exhaled. “Let’s see the boy.”
He stepped out of the room onto the landing. A chair outside the door gave him reason to pause. He checked the wood underneath the door handle on the outside.
“Someone barricaded her in here,” he said. “They were worried she’d wake up and raise the alarm. They planned this, knew which order they were going to kill each of the family members in. This was definitely premeditated.”
“I hate to say it, but don’t think we can rule out the teenager,” Frome said. “We found the knife still in his body, so he was clearly the final victim. The big question is if it was self-inflicted or if someone else stabbed him. He has a lot of blood over him—more than I’d expect just from a single stab wound. It could be the blood of his sister and mother.”
“Show me.”
Ryan walked into the boy’s room. The walls were covered in posters for heavy metal bands and classic slasher horror films. The bedcovers were black, as were the curtains. The room wouldn’t have been out of place in a horror flick anyway, but the body of the sixteen-year-old lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the carpet gave it added weight. Sticking out of his stomach was a large kitchen knife.
“We have to consider that this knife is the murder weapon,” Ryan said, standing over him.
Frome nodded. “Looks to be that way, as far as we can tell. Nothing else has been found in the house. Obviously, forensics will give us a better idea.”
Ryan turned to Nikki. “Is whether he did it himself or not something you can determine during the post-mortem?”
“I might be able to get an idea either way, depending on the angle of the blade and the depth of the wound, but it won’t determine it for sure.”
Ryan blew out a breath. “With all the doors locked and no sign of a break-in, it does seem as though the attack came from inside the house. I don’t think we can ignore how this looks.”
Frome raised an eyebrow. “That he killed his parents and sister, and then stabbed himself in the stomach?”
“The most obvious explanation is normally the right one,” Ryan said, “but until we get forensics back, we’ll need to keep our minds open.”
Ryan stepped outside of the room again, back onto the landing. He ducked at the door and checked beneath the handle. “Do you see this?” he said to Mallory.
She dropped down to get a better view. “Scrapes against the metal and wood?”
Ryan nodded. “They’re the same as beneath the girl’s door.”
“You think someone jammed a chair under his door handle as well?”
“I’d say so. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to say when that happened. Maybe the parents used it as a way of keeping him in his room, and he replicated it to keep his sister from running away.”
“There might have been abuse in the home,” Mallory suggested. “Perhaps that’s the motive the boy had for killing his parents?”
“But then why kill the sister as well?” he said. “If she was suffering from the same abuse, what motive would he have to murder her?”
She shrugged. “He just snapped. It does happen.”
Ryan agreed, it did, but it was too soon to make any judgements for sure. They’d need to interview any remaining family, plus friends, and the teachers at school, find out if there had been any signs of abuse on the children.
“Until we get forensic results from the blood on the body and prints from the knife, we don’t know what happened. Just ’cause a kid’s got a black bedcover doesn’t make him capable of murdering his family.”
Mallory straightened and put her hands on her hips. “The doors were all locked from the inside, the alarm was set. It’s more likely than not that someone from inside the house killed them all, and since he was clearly the last one to die...”
“I understand your thinking but like I said, let’s wait for forensics and the post-mortem before we jump to any conclusions.”
A shout came from downstairs. “We’ve found something.”
Ryan exchanged a glance with Mallory, and they both hurried back to the ground floor. The shout had come from the kitchen, so Ryan went in to find one of the Scenes of Crime officers holding up a freezer bag containing what appeared to be four mobile phones.
“Guess we’ve found the phones,” Mallory said.
&nbs
p; Ryan narrowed his eyes. “That’s odd. Why would the family’s mobile phones be in the freezer?”
The officer handed the bag over to Ryan, and he held them up to eye level. “They’re all switched off.”
“Maybe someone put them there to hide them?” Mallory said. “Hid them from the family members so they couldn’t put a call in for help?”
“And if they were switched off, they wouldn’t be able to call the phones to locate them either.” Ryan contemplated these most recent findings. “What’s the last thing you do before you go to bed, Mallory?”
“Umm, check my phone. Make sure my alarm is set.”
“Yep, same. Someone must have gathered up the phones while the family was sleeping. If they’d done it before then, the owners would have noticed they were missing, and known something was wrong.”
She tilted her head slightly. “So, someone moved around the house while they were asleep and took the phones? How did this person know where they’d all be?”
“Where do you keep yours at night?”
“On my nightstand, beside my bed.”
“Whoever did this wouldn’t have wanted the victims to have such easy access to their mobile phones, so they took them, turned them off, and hid them.”
“They weren’t worried about being seen?”
“Maybe they thought it was worth the risk.” Ryan turned to Ben Glazier, who was the Scenes of Crime coordinator. “Have you found anything else down here?”
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“No blood?”
“Not that we’ve found.”
“Then it was contained to the upstairs.” He wondered out loud. “If someone murdered four people, wouldn’t they have blood on them? On their shoes, or their hands. What would the chances be of them being able to walk through a house to leave without getting some of that blood on the floors or walls or doors?”
Mallory grimaced. “Slim to none.”
“Exactly. So, what happened? Were they wearing a getup like this?” He gestured to their own protective gear, “and disposed of it upstairs? If so, where is it?”
“Or they took it with them?”
“Yes, also a possibility, but it must mean they took the time to clean up. Most people, if they were to break into a house and murder four people, would want to get out again as quickly as possible, but this person must have taken the time to make sure they didn’t have blood on them.”
“Or it was the son,” Mallory pointed out. “He would have been able to move around the house freely and would know where each family member kept their phone at night. It would also explain why there is no blood downstairs because none of them ever came downstairs. They all died in their rooms, including him.”
Ryan pointed a finger at her. “But then why did he hide his own phone in the freezer? What would be the point? It’s not as though he wouldn’t know where he put it.”
“He didn’t want one of his family members to get hold of it and call for help? Or else he was trying to make it appear as though he was just a victim, too?”
“Good suggestions, but he hasn’t made any other attempt to make it look as though he wasn’t the one responsible for the murders. If he was trying to make it appear as though someone had broken in, wouldn’t he have at least unlocked the door and disabled the alarm? I bet he would have known the code.”
They left the house again, and Ryan stepped back to get a view of the front wall. The alarm system bothered him.
Sergeant Frome joined them, and Ryan pointed at the small red box on the side of the house.
“Why do they have an alarm system? Were they just paranoid? Had they been broken into before?”
Frome checked her notes. “There’s a police report from a couple of months ago where the wife claimed someone was watching the house. Police came out, couldn’t see anything, but they suggested she put the alarm system in.”
“If someone else has the alarm code and a key, they could have let themselves into the house, disabled the alarm, murdered the family, and then got out again, resetting the alarm and locking the door behind them “
Frome raised her eyebrows. “Sounds like someone who knew them then, for them to know the codes.”
“Or no one broke into the house in the first place,” Mallory interjected, “and it was the teenage son who was responsible.”
Ryan mused on the possibility. “We need to contact the alarm company and get a record of when the alarm was armed and disabled. That should give us a better idea about who entered and left the house, and at what time.”
He assumed the family didn’t normally set and unset the alarm in the middle of the night, and so it would be out of place on the history. Would that mean it was someone close to the family who would have access to that information, though? Maybe someone who worked for the alarm company would also know. He didn’t know enough about how house alarms worked, so he jotted down in his notebook quickly to get one of his constables to check it out.
Movement came from the front door, and Ryan glanced over as Nikki exited the property.
She pulled down the hood of her protective wear and removed her gloves and mask. “I assume we’ll talk again once the post-mortems have been done,” she said to Ryan.
“Yes, absolutely. I’m particularly interested to get your thoughts on the boy’s stab wound.”
“I’ll give you my thoughts, but I won’t be able to tell one hundred percent either way. It’s up to you to come to a conclusion.”
“Of course. I just trust your opinion.”
She paused for a moment, her gaze fixed on his face, her lips slightly pursed. “You know, it’s a shame it’s taken a murdered family to get to see you again.”
Heat rose to his face. “Sorry, life’s been a bit crazy.”
She shrugged. “Sure, you don’t have to make excuses.”
“No, really. My wife—” he corrected himself, realising his mistake, “my ex-wife—has cancer. I’ve been helping out where I can.”
She grimaced. “Oh, shit, sorry. I didn’t mean to be an arsehole about it.”
He immediately felt bad for using Donna’s illness as an excuse about why he’d been avoiding her. “No, I should be sorry. I’m the arsehole.”
She gave a small smile. “You’re helping your ex-wife when she has cancer. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing to me.”
“Maybe not. The new guy buggered off the minute she got the diagnosis and left her on her own. I didn’t feel like I could do the same.”
“I understand.”
She didn’t, though, and that wasn’t her fault. He’d never confided in her, or anyone else for that matter, about the struggles he went through every day. He convinced himself it was no one else’s business when, really, he was worried about the repercussions of letting people in. He didn’t want to be given all the well-meaning advice about what to do, even by people who cared about him and meant well.
“Detective,” Sergeant Frome called him over. “One of the neighbours might have heard something.”
Ryan was glad to have the distraction.
“Excuse me,” he said to Nikki. “Work calls.”
She nodded in understanding. “I’ll give you a call when I’m done with the post-mortems.”
“See you then.”
He was relieved that their next meeting would take place in the mortuary. No one could get any wrong ideas when they were standing over a body that had been opened from groin to sternum during an autopsy.
Chapter Three
Helen Bolton stared at the chopping board and knife abandoned on the worksurface, and a familiar feeling of irritation rose inside her, spilling out of her mouth.
“How many times do I have to ask you to clean up after yourself?” She grabbed the items, throwing them into the dishwasher, and then angrily running water over a cloth to wipe down the surface again. “We’ve got an estate agent arriving any minute now, and despite the house looking perfect when I left for work this morning, y
ou seem to have managed to trash it since you got home.”
From the kitchen table, her fifteen-year-old daughter, Reese, rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, Mum, you’re so overreacting. I do live here, remember? I was hungry when I got back from school, so I got a snack.”
“I don’t care if you got a snack, I care if you left everything all over the kitchen worktop. Haven’t you ever heard of a dishcloth?”
Reese pouted and slid down in her chair. “I don’t even want to sell the house. What’s wrong with where we are?”
Helen let out a long sigh. “I’m not having this conversation with you again. Your dad’s job has moved, and we can’t ask him to commute for almost three hours a day to get there and back. It’s not fair on him.”
“What about what’s fair on us? All our friends are here.”
“You’ll still be able to see them. Exeter isn’t that far away.”
“If it’s not that far, why can’t Dad commute?”
“It’s a bit different when we’re talking about your social life versus the thing that’s keeping a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs.”
She really didn’t have time to go over all this again. She understood it was hard for the kids to have to change cities and schools, but that was just what had to happen, and they would adapt.
Reese shoved back her chair with all the grace of a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum. “Ugh, whatever. I’m going to my room. I’ve got homework to do.”
Helen held back a scream. Why did Reese have to be so bloody unreasonable all the time? Why was it so hard for her to put something away after she’d used it or wipe down a surface? Helen missed when her daughter had been small—not that Reese’s younger brother, Tyler, was much better. He was twelve now and almost as moody as his sister. She was surprised her husband, Andy, even wanted them to move to be closer to his work. At the moment, he got to be out of the house twelve hours a day and by the time he got back, she’d already dealt with all the chaos of the time between the end of school and after dinner. He got to come home and put his feet up. Not that she resented him for it—well, not all the time anyway. Things would change once they’d moved, and he was able to drive to and from work within half an hour. He’d be here more, and she could leave him to deal with the kids’ bad tempers.