City of Sinners

by A. A. Dhand

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  It is an ordinary Yorkshire morning, cold and miserable.

  The streets are not yet busy. Police cars hurriedly pull up in the centre of town. But something is not right. None of the lights are flashing, the sirens are eerily silent.

  A body has been found. A young woman, elaborately and painstakingly positioned to send a message. But why? And to whom?

  It’s DCI Harry Virdee’s job to find out. And what Harry doesn’t yet know is that, even as he approaches the crime scene, he is being watched.

  Harry is on the hunt for a serial killer. But the killer isn’t running, he’s hiding.

  He is biding his time.

  Because this is personal.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  Seventy-Six

  Seventy-Seven

  Seventy-Eight

  Seventy-Nine

  Eighty

  Eighty-One

  Eighty-Two

  Eighty-Three

  Eighty-Four

  Eighty-Five

  Eighty-Six

  Eighty-Seven

  Eighty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by A. A. Dhand

  Copyright

  CITY OF SINNERS

  A. A. Dhand

  For Sam

  PROLOGUE

  HE’LL NEVER BE the same again, I’m going to make sure of it.

  Once he steps under the yellow police cordon, to enter a nightmare entirely of his own making.

  Detective Harry Virdee. The papers say there isn’t a case he can’t solve. But he won’t have seen a murder like this.

  Never like this.

  I’m going to drag him to the darkest corners of my mind, a place where nothing pure exists any more.

  I can still feel it, my hand clasped over her mouth, as her life slipped away. I felt powerful then.

  Like I mattered.

  Sitting here, in City Park, the bench cold under me, dried blood lingering in the creases of my palms, the world carries on around me. No one knows what I have done. The passers-by are attached to their phones, lost in their own worlds. They don’t see me here. But I see them. Even in the bitter cold, the girls dress to show off their figures, tight-fitting coats, bare legs, expensive heels and immaculate make-up. They think these things are important.

  They should know better.

  I like being this close, seeing the flashing blue lights of police cars as they park outside Bradford Waterstones.

  This is my doing. I created this anarchy. It excites me.

  As the forensic vans arrive, men in white suits organize themselves outside the shop window; they’re too professional to whisper but I know what they’re thinking.

  Who could do this?

  Why?

  Looking around City Park, it is quite clear to me.

  We’re all numb. We have become so used to violence and trauma on our TV screens that we just don’t care any more.

  We are unshockable.

  We don’t listen. And we never learn.

  Today, the start of Bradford’s darkest week begins.

  By the end of this, people will listen.

  They will learn.

  Most importantly, they will never forget.

  Detective Virdee is about to discover this is merely the start.

  I am surrounded by sin, this is a city of sinners, a city that is about to learn an important lesson. And I am the one to deliver it.

  The time for ignorance is over.

  ONE

  DCI HARRY VIRDEE stared up at the body. Suspended high in the air by a noose around her neck, she hung from the rafters of Bradford’s most beautiful bookshop. She was naked except for a red headscarf wrapped around her face, the decorative detail glistening in the early morning gloom. The quiet was marred only by the stifled cries of the manager, who had already identified the body as one of her members of staff, Usma Khan.

  It was an impressive building. It had once been the Wool Exchange, back when Bradford had been one of the richest cities in Europe.

  Those times were long gone.

  Harry couldn’t help but think the dramatic setting perfectly complemented the macabre image of the girl floating in the air. She looked like a banished angel. The dome-shaped ceiling was over a hundred feet high, gloomily lit by the weak sun streaming through ornate glass windows.

  One window had been smashed, the Star of David at its centre destroyed.

  Harry had been with HMET, the Homicide Major Enquiry Team, in Bradford for over a decade. He was a difficult man to shock but he’d never seen anything quite like this. Nor had his team. Scenes of crime officers stood beside him, trying to figure out how they were going to search the area, awaiting Harry’s orders. Forensics looked equally uncertain. Sweeping the space was going to be a logistical nightmare, the bookshop would be full of DNA, it’d be impossible to tell the killer apart from the customers.

  ‘What a shit Monday morning,’ DI Simon Palmer said, looking up to the ceiling. Harry could smell bacon on his breath. Whereas Harry was athletic, his suit fitting snugly across his broad shoulders, Palmer’s hung clumsily from his rounded frame.

  He waited expectantly.

  As Senior Investigating Officer, everyone’s eyes were on Harry. A dead Asian girl, in such theatrical circumstances, was a new one for Harry, yet in the cauldron of Bradford nothing really surprised him any more.

  ‘If the killer got up there, Simon, we can too,’ he said. ‘We’re not dealing with Spider-Man.’

  Harry left the team standing among the bookshelves as he approached the ornately carved stone staircase and walked slowly up to the mezzanine floor, which housed a c
afé.

  From here he had a closer view of the victim; she was fair for an Asian girl and slight. Her long black hair was visible despite the red veil across her face. No tattoos, no defining features. Harry felt a familiar sense of unease. What was he missing?

  The noose; not a rope but barbed wire.

  Harry winced.

  Usma had been responsible for locking up the shop at the end of her Sunday shift. She’d have been alone here for at least half an hour. Suicide couldn’t be ruled out.

  But cries for help were seldom this sensationally staged. Harry felt it in his gut: this was a murder scene.

  Palmer joined him at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Is that barbed wire?’ he asked.

  ‘Looks it.’

  ‘Christ.’

  Palmer dangled a set of keys at Harry. ‘There’s a passage that leads up to the dome. Before we go up, we’ll have to do a risk assess—’

  Harry took the keys from him.

  The second staircase looped around the main floor space of the bookshop. A narrow enclosed walkway, with a claustrophobic feel. Harry and Palmer kept to one side, placing their feet carefully, their white SOCO suits bright in the dim light.

  At the top, a stone path circled the domed ceiling, giving access to each of the beautiful old windows. Under the broken one, among the shattered glass, Harry could see a scattering of pink rose petals and what looked like a bloody print. He released a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. They might get lucky there.

  Harry inched closer, peering out through the broken window.

  Hell of a drop.

  The barbed wire suspending the victim’s body had been fed out through the window and was tied around something Harry couldn’t quite make out. But the sight of more rose petals decorating the barbed wire brought bunting fleetingly to mind.

  ‘Turning out to be a proper house of horror, this one,’ said Harry. ‘Question is, how to get her down?’

  They couldn’t pull her body up. The barbed wire would shred the skin around her neck and they needed to preserve her body exactly as they had found it.

  Harry turned to Palmer. ‘Get the fire brigade down here and tell them we’re going to need a crane.’

  TWO

  HARRY CLEARED THE area as the body was brought down by the fire brigade. Just his core team remained, awkward and expectant, standing among the rows of neatly organized bookcases. In the silence, he heard a pair of high heels clicking on the stone floor behind him. His boss had arrived.

  The sound stopped just behind Harry, who had crouched by the victim. Detective Superintendent Clare Conway wasn’t there to babysit Harry, far from it; but a murder like this was sure to have everyone on edge, from uniformed officers on the street to the top of the political hierarchy.

  This was no spur-of-the-moment killing.

  Somebody had taken their time.

  Somebody wanted to make an impression.

  Harry took in the detail he hadn’t been able to see before. Usma’s pale skin was spotted with deep purple hives, and she looked swollen somehow. She wore a gold ring on each index finger and decorative red henna mehndi on her hands. It reminded Harry of an Asian bride on her wedding day. Most bizarrely, she wore false nails vividly decorated in red, orange and green with a three-dimensional rose on one nail of each hand.

  How much of this was Usma and how much was the killer?

  Harry nodded for a forensic officer to remove the red veil from across the girl’s face. It was unravelled three times, gently pulled free and immediately placed in an evidence bag.

  Harry heard a collective intake of breath from his team.

  He remained motionless. The girl’s eyes had been sewn shut.

  There was a note secured around her neck.

  The forensic officer gently raised the victim’s head, removed the note and handed it to Harry, who shifted on to one knee. He sensed Clare Conway moving in closer behind him, her black heels now in his peripheral view.

  Harry unfolded the note. His eyes narrowed, his brow creased.

  He read it again.

  And a third time.

  One simple word.

  SINNER.

  As Harry stood up, the note in his hand, his boss grabbed him by the shoulder hard enough to startle him.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘look at her eyes.’

  Harry turned back to face the victim.

  ‘Did they just—?’ he started.

  Clare stepped closer, her hand tightening nervously on Harry’s arm.

  He was seeing things, surely.

  Harry crouched down again, his heart racing, sweat prickling on his temples. He leaned forward and waited.

  Nothing.

  He reached out a hand and double-checked.

  No pulse.

  Skin cold to the touch.

  He removed a pen from his pocket, paused, then tapped the victim’s left eye.

  Harry flinched as her eye twitched.

  He heard his boss whisper something in disbelief.

  Harry’s hand was shaking, nothing in his experience had prepared him for this. He tapped the girl’s other eye and when the same thing happened, he got quickly to his feet.

  ‘Mortuary,’ he said to the lead forensic officer. ‘Now.’

  THREE

  THE SCREEN ABOVE Saima Virdee’s desk showed the A&E waiting times. Most of the text was red. Officially, patients were still being told to expect a four-hour wait. In reality it was closer to six.

  Monday morning and already the department was an endless cacophony of chatter. Patients lay on gurneys that lined the corridors by the wards. Ambulances were backed up outside, unable to leave their patients until they had been accepted by a department which had run out of beds hours ago. Bradford’s emergency unit, like every other in the country, was buckling under the strain of this winter’s flu virus, a far more virulent strain than previous years. And on top of that, a bitter snap of arctic, winter air seemingly had every asthmatic in the city rushing towards A&E. This week, the forecast was for snow. Flu would give way to broken bones. Waiting times weren’t about to improve.

  In the waiting room, a security guard was attempting to calm a drunk who was convinced a glass-cut on his arm was turning septic.

  The start of the week and already Saima was dealing with drunks.

  ‘Why do I do this?’ she whispered to herself.

  As the man’s behaviour grew worse and his voice louder, a junior doctor approached the nursing desk, requesting that Saima call the police. She waved him away. Security would decide if and when the police were needed.

  Saima rubbed her bloodshot eyes. She hadn’t slept well, Aaron had woken up at four a.m. and refused to go back to sleep until she took him into bed with her. Her three-year-old was adept at the art of toddler manipulation. She knew she needed to be firmer but she loved sleeping next to him, his innocent breath on her face.

  Sharp footsteps interrupted her thoughts.

  Auburn pigtails bobbing on her shoulders, her colleague Linda, known in the department as the ‘pocket-rocket’, marched up to the desk and thrust a coat into Saima’s arms.

  ‘We’ve got manual handling, Nurse Virdee. We miss training again and Matron’s going to shit a brick. There’s more than enough nurses off sick with bad backs because they lifted a patient incorrectly whilst wiping their arse.’

  ‘Linda, it’s my neck on the line, not yours,’ replied Saima, pointing up at the screen. ‘If I can’t get this sorted then—’

  ‘Look at that beautiful red screen, like a menstrual cycle for the department.’

  Saima frowned. ‘Do you always have to be so vulgar?’

  ‘We’re bleeding staff, beds and’ – Linda pointed down the corridor where the drunk was still shouting – ‘patience. Everyone’s in a shitty mood. Feels like a perfect period to me.’

  Linda placed her stethoscope on the counter and nudged Saima’s jacket. ‘Manual handling? Leave the headaches to someone else for a while.’<
br />
  ‘You want to trade jobs?’ asked Saima.

  ‘Hell no. You’re doing a band eight job on a band six wage.’

  Saima shrugged. ‘Charity begins at home.’

  ‘This isn’t home.’

  ‘Might as well be. We spend more time here.’

  Saima picked up her coffee cup, its contents now cold. ‘Second one I’ve made this morning and not finished.’

  ‘You had time to make two coffees?’ said Linda, tapping her foot impatiently. ‘Can’t you find a cute doctor to make you another one?’

  ‘They’ve not exactly taken a shine to me yet. All they’ve seen so far is a bossy bitch worried about waiting times,’ said Saima.

  ‘What, no love for the hot new sister in charge? Come on.’

  Saima shot her friend a look.

  ‘I’ve heard them talking, love. If your husband wasn’t a copper, they’d all be trying it on.’

  Linda picked up Saima’s coat again. ‘Come on, we need to go. Let’s knock this training out. And since we’re mates, you want to let me piss off early after?’

  Saima smiled. ‘Not a chance.’

  Saima stood outside the A&E entrance, waiting for Linda. Manual handling was an hour’s refresher course, held at St Luke’s. Quicker to drive than wait for hospital transport. When they were done, Saima would return to A&E, back to the red computer screen, counting down the hours until she could collect Aaron from nursery at four o’clock.

  She wondered what new words he would have picked up today. She and Harry had just the one child. They were talking about trying for another. They’d both come from big families, but since their own parents had cut them out, Aaron wouldn’t grow up playing with his cousins in the way his parents had. Harry was Sikh and Saima Muslim; according to their parents, they had each married the devil.

  Recently, Saima’s sister, Nadia, had reconnected with her, but Saima didn’t trust her family any more than she trusted Harry’s; neither side was ever going to really accept their relationship.

  At last Linda’s clapped-out Toyota pulled into view, its horn beeping loudly.

  ‘About time,’ said Saima.

  As she moved towards it, an ambulance pulled in, lights still flashing, and the back doors flew open. One paramedic leapt from the back while his colleague exited the driver’s side and ran to help.

  Saima stepped aside as they pulled a trolley out of the van, an elderly Asian man lying on it. One paramedic began chest compressions on him while the other steered the trolley towards the building.