by LJ Ross
Once again, they spotted Faulkner’s van parked a little further along the street, not far from an ambulance with its back door open in readiness to transport a patient. The reason soon became apparent when two paramedics wheeled Joan Watson out of her son’s house on a stretcher, with her daughter hurrying alongside.
“You’ll be fine, mum, don’t worry. They’ll take good care of you,” she said, tearfully.
“There, now,” her husband said, giving her an awkward pat.
“Mr and Mrs Emerson,” Ryan greeted them, as they met on the pavement. “We’re very sorry to hear of your loss.”
Sally’s eyes welled up, but she waved away any sympathy.
“Never mind us. Poor Mum—she found him like that…” Her breath caught in her throat as she battled the horrifying image of her brother sprawled on the floor, the last she would ever see of him.
“Is Joan going to be alright?” Phillips asked. “She’s had two terrible blows, this week.”
“I don’t know, sergeant. I have no idea how she’ll cope, or even if she’ll cope. She suffered another mild stroke when she found Simon’s body, and the hospital think there might have been a heart attack too, so they’re going to run some more tests and keep her in overnight for observation. On top of all that, she’s still healing from the burns.”
“We’ll need to stop by and have a word with Mrs Watson,” Ryan said. “But we can wait a while, to give her a chance to recover.”
“Thank you,” Sally said, with feeling. “I really—we really must go now. I think the ambulance is leaving.”
“Would it be alright to come and pay a visit at home, so we can understand the timeline of events, from your perspective?”
“Any time after three,” Mike said, and, at her questioning look, went on to explain that he was due to be playing golf later that day.
“Any time,” she corrected him. “We’ll make ourselves available, chief inspector.”
* * *
Jack Lowerson couldn’t stay at home, even if he wanted to.
His every move was being catalogued, and he knew that Singh would find out very quickly if he hadn’t shown up for work. Their bargain depended on him being at the office in order to feed information back, in exchange for Singh not revealing the images taken of him and Rochelle to the Ghost Squad.
As if they had read his mind, another message came through on the little burner mobile that stayed close to him at all times, like a doctor on call.
This time, the message was not what he expected:
MAKE SURE PENSHAW OVERDOSE NOT SUSPICIOUS. TELL RYAN ACCIDENTAL DEATH.
It took him only a matter of seconds to understand that Bobby’s Singh’s influence stretched much further than even he had imagined. He didn’t know what the connection might be between a fifty-year-old manager from Penshaw, his eighty-year-old father, and a criminal underboss. All he knew was that, if he failed to follow the instruction, everything would fold.
* * *
After Sally and Mike Emerson left to follow the ambulance to the hospital, Ryan and Phillips retrieved their coveralls from the back of the car and readied themselves to enter the house. Once inside, they found the bungalow crawling with CSIs; androgynous figures whose faces were hidden beneath the masks they wore as they rustled through the remnants of a person’s life.
“Faulkner?”
The Senior CSI looked up as they entered the living room, which appeared to be where the majority of the action had taken place. In line with emergency protocols, Simon Watson’s body had been moved from its original position, so that the paramedics could attempt CPR. In this case, the emergency doctor had pronounced Simon dead soon after their arrival.
Now, he lay face-up in the middle of the floor, arms flung wide. His face was mottled and swollen, the veins in his right arm standing out like swollen black rivers against his deathly pale skin. Post-mortem lividity had caused the blood to settle in one half of his body—in this case, the front half, which was dark red.
“Looks like he was lying face-down when he died,” Phillips said, after taking several deep breaths.
“Yes. The paramedics say he was lying over there, next to the coffee table, when they arrived.”
“Had anybody touched him?” Ryan asked.
“Well, the paramedics say he looked obviously dead—his mother had tried to move him but couldn’t quite manage it, because of the injuries to her hands.”
Ryan looked across the room to where several small yellow markers had been set out beside a heavy-looking glass coffee table. On the extreme edge, there was a hairline crack encrusted with a small amount of blood and other fibres.
“Is there a head injury?” he asked.
“Yes, there’s a deep cut on his left temple,” Faulkner said, leaning down on his haunches to inspect the wound.
Phillips preferred to keep a safe distance.
“Usual drugs paraphernalia,” he said, pointing to where a needle lay on the carpet beneath the coffee table, on top of which there was a spoon and a lighter.
“There was a tiny piece of needle protruding from his skin,” Faulkner added. “I’ve bagged it for the lab. It seems obvious it’s the piece missing from that needle over there, which we’ll also bag for toxicology.”
Ryan stood at the side of the room, noting the placement of each item and where it had fallen, trying to visualise what might have happened.
“So, he was sitting on the sofa when he took a hit from the needle, leading to a fatal overdose, and then, his body slumped forward, and he hit the side of his head on the coffee table when he went down. Is that it?”
“It’s all pointing in that direction,” Faulkner agreed. “We’ve only really just begun sweeping the place here, so I’ll know more in a couple of days.”
He paused.
“Something bothers me, about the coffee table,” he said.
The other two waited for him to elaborate.
“If he fell right after he took the overdose, the blood would still be circulating,” Faulkner said. “I’d expect to see more spatter on the coffee table, or on the floor.”
Ryan nodded.
“There’s something else that puzzles me,” he said, walking carefully around the perimeter of the room until he reached the sofa, where he tested one of the cushions with a gloved hand.
“The sofa dips towards the back,” he said. “It’s also quite low to the ground. Common sense alone tells me that Simon Watson’s recently deceased body wouldn’t have had the upward thrust needed to fall out of the chair in the manner we’re expected to believe.”
“So what are you saying?” Phillips asked. “It was a set up? We already know Simon had his troubles with heroin, in the past.”
“And everybody knew it,” Ryan said.
“It’s a risky business, with Joan in the house,” Phillips remarked. “She might’ve heard something.”
“Not under medication, late at night. Pinter should be able to give us a more accurate estimation of the time of death.”
Phillips shook his head, sadly.
“It could be that the grief over Alan’s death and all the stress of his mother being unwell sent him over the edge. As a recovering addict, he’d be more vulnerable in times of personal strife.”
Ryan nodded.
“That might be true,” he agreed. “He might’ve been perching on the edge of the sofa when he shot up, and that explains how he was able to fall forward.”
He looked around the room again, then dropped down to look underneath the sofa. Then, with careful hands, he searched the dead man’s pockets, gritting his teeth against the gassy odour that was beginning to emanate from the body.
“Has anything else been bagged, Tom?”
“Not yet,” Faulkner replied. “We things in situ so you could get a feel for the scene.”
Ryan smiled grimly.
“In that case, I want to know what happened to the pouch.”
Phillips gave him a quizzical look.
“How’d you mean?”
“The pouch where he kept the drugs, or the plastic bag the dealer gave him, with the residue inside. Where is it?”
All three men cast their eyes around the floor space, and even rolled the body to check it wasn’t hidden beneath. For completeness, they checked the other rooms of the house, and used the forensic team’s special wire camera to check that it had not been flushed down the toilet. It took extra time, but Ryan was not a man for half measures.
“Why would the dealer wait and take the bag away, afterwards? Unless they knew it was likely to be lethal…” Phillips said.
“Or, maybe, it was a tiny error on the part of Simon’s killer,” Ryan said. “There’s no such thing as a perfect crime, and he’s made a couple of slip-ups with this one. I wonder whether he—or she—was rushed into making mistakes.”
Ryan looked upon the wasted body of Simon Watson with an expression caught somewhere between grief and fury. This man had turned his life around, had only just begun to live again, before it was all snatched away from him.
“The thing is, I can’t see any motive,” Phillips said. “It’s the same as his father—who’d want to kill a frail old man, or a recovering addict?”
Ryan’s phone signalled a new message, and he glanced over the contents before making a check of the time.
If he was quick, he could make it.
“That’s what we need to find out, Frank,” he murmured. “You stay here and see what else turns up; I need to get back to the office.”
Phillips opened his mouth to ask what was so pressing, but Ryan had already gone.
CHAPTER 21
Ryan did not go directly to Police Headquarters, but made a very short, very important detour to the pathologist’s office.
“Jeff.”
Pinter was munching on a ham sandwich, which was enough to turn Ryan’s stomach, given the proximity of his office to the service area of the mortuary.
“Ryan! I didn’t know you were coming,” he said, and wiped his hands on some paper towelling. “Are you here about Simon Watson? He hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m on standby—”
“I know, I’ve just come from the scene,” Ryan said, and shut the office door behind him.
Pinter raised an eyebrow.
“Anything the matter, then?”
Ryan had thought carefully about what action to take following Lowerson’s revelations the previous night. Subterfuge went against the grain but, he reasoned, it was all for the greater good.
“I need you to make two reports on Simon Watson. One report for the official file which states that everything points to an accidental overdose, and then another report with whatever your real conclusions are, for my eyes only.”
Pinter was silent for long seconds.
“Is all this above board, Ryan? Why would you need two reports, and why is the real one ‘for your eyes only’?”
“I’m sorry, Jeff, but I can’t tell you that. I hope you’ll trust me to act in the best interests of my team, and with the integrity required of my profession.”
Pinter looked at the tall, raven-haired man he’d come to think of as a friend. Ryan was widely known to be incorruptible; a force for good in the world of law enforcement against which others might be measured and found wanting.
And yet, he’d asked him to falsify a report, and show the true report only to him.
There had to be a reason. He would not believe Ryan capable of wilful deception without having gone through the proper reporting channels, or having sought authority beforehand.
“Alright, Ryan,” he said quietly. “I trust that you know what you’re doing.”
* * *
Ryan’s next port of call was Police Headquarters but, instead of entering through the main doors as he usually would, he parked close to the rear exit which was mostly used when transporting suspects to court or detention elsewhere. He took out a small rucksack, which he slung over one shoulder, and made his way to the rear doors. There were two CCTV cameras, and he stopped to look up at them, before entering a key code to buzz himself in.
Once inside, there were no more cameras in the communal areas, and he made his way quickly to the Evidence Store. Before he rounded the corner, where he knew an attendant would be on duty keeping a log of all incoming and outgoing evidence, Ryan took out his smartphone and made a note of the time.
He was all smiles when he approached the desk sergeant, and her face lit up in response. She might have been a happily married mother of three, but she still had red blood in her veins, and the sight of DCI Maxwell Ryan—all six feet, four inches of him—was enough to brighten anybody’s day.
“Hello, stranger,” she said. “Haven’t seen you in a little while.”
“Hi, Kim,” he flashed another winning smile. “I wanted to have a quick look at the murder weapon from one of my old cases, if you don’t mind.”
He reeled off the case number of a cold file, from a couple of years ago.
“We’ve had a spate of stabbings, and I wanted to see whether the weapon is similar to one we’ve seen before.”
“I don’t know how you find the time,” she said, with admiration. “Just give us your autograph in the log, here, and help yourself. D’you need a pair of gloves?”
He took a fresh pair of nitrile gloves from the box she offered.
“You’ll have to leave your bag here,” she said, with a pained expression. “It’s the rules.”
“Of course,” he said, scrambling for an alternative plan.
After he’d scrawled his name in the logbook, Kim unlocked the steel-caged doors leading to the Evidence Store and he stepped inside.
“Don’t get lost in there!” she called out.
It was not altogether a joke, Ryan thought, as he surveyed row upon row of shelves, each containing boxes or larger items on their own, properly indexed.
He glanced behind him to find Kim still watching from her high desk chair.
“Wrong way!” she laughed. “It’s in aisle seven, to your left.”
Ryan pretended to slap his own head.
“Don’t know my left from my right, this morning,” he said, and duly turned around to make his way to the aisle she had indicated.
Unfortunately, it was nowhere near the aisle he needed. With lightning-swift movements, he scanned the shelves for a mobile phone and snatched up the first one he saw, inside a little plastic evidence bag. Peering through the gaps in the shelves, Ryan checked to see whether anybody else was coming, or whether Kim was looking in his direction, and then retrieved his own mobile from his back pocket, which he used to take a photograph of the random evidence bag. Then, he carried them both to the end of the aisle, furthest away from the desk, and hurried along the back wall towards the aisle he really needed.
The physical evidence pertaining to Dan “The Demon” Hepple’s murder was being kept in aisle fourteen and, after a quick search, he found the two plastic evidence bags he was looking for. Ryan used his smartphone to take another photograph of the original tags on the burner mobile and ladies knickers belonging to Rochelle White, and then crouched to the floor while he made the swap. The fresh evidence bags he’d brought were still in his rucksack, and so he had to make do with what he had, conscious all the while that they could not be contaminated.
Rather than swapping the contents of each bag, he’d simply swap their codes.
Ryan always kept a biro in his pocket, which wasn’t the same as the Sharpie permanent marker the forensics team used to label the bags, but it would have to do. With a steady hand, he altered the codes on each bag and took another photograph on his smartphone before setting the ‘new’ evidence back on the shelf. There was no ready replacement for the knickers belonging to Rochelle; the ones he’d brought to swap in for those were also in the rucksack.
He stuffed the small plastic bag inside his shirt, flattening it as best he could. They’d have to go missing, he thought.
His final task was to place Rochelle’s o
ld burner mobile on a shelf in aisle seven, because he was conscious that time was marching on. As he retraced his steps along the back wall, he heard the scrape of Kim’s chair against the floor as she stood up and went in search of him.
Moving at breakneck speed, Ryan darted into aisle seven and searched frantically for an empty spot at the back of a high shelf, where only Ryan would know where to find it—although still technically in the Evidence Store, anyone else trying to find the mobile would be searching for a needle in a haystack.
By the time Kim stuck her head around the edge of the shelving unit, Ryan was holding up a clear bag containing an ornate knife, turning it this way and that.
“Everything alright?” she asked, cheerfully. “I was just about to go on my lunch.”
“I’m finished here, anyway,” Ryan said, making his way back out of the caged metal area. “Thanks, Kim.”
He turned to leave.
“Ryan.”
He froze, feeling the plastic bag rustle against his skin.
“Mm?”
“You forgot to sign out,” she said.
After he’d scrawled his name again, Ryan didn’t run but walked at a moderate pace, all the way out of the Evidence Store and around the corner of the basement corridor. He kept it up all the way to the lift, nodding to his colleagues who spilled out when the doors swished open.
Once he was alone and the doors closed softly behind him, Ryan leaned back against the mirrored wall and wondered what the hell he had got himself into.
CHAPTER 22
Phillips spent half an hour surveying Simon Watson’s home and, after a final word with Tom Faulkner and another fruitless hour completing door-to-door enquiries with one of the local constables, he decided to make his way over to the dead man’s workplace. If Ryan’s suspicions were correct and Watson’s death was not as straightforward as it seemed, there had to be some reason why he was targeted by whichever unknown assassin entered his home. A quick look around that home had not helped matters; Simon Watson had been a frugal sort of man, not given to keeping trinkets or files of yellowing paperwork. Ordinarily, Phillips might have admired his restraint, but when it came to finding a motive for murder, it was mighty inconvenient.