Crimesight

by Joy Ellis

  CRIMESIGHT by Joy Ellis

  Smashwords Edition Copyright 2013 Joy Ellis

  All rights reserved. No part of this e-book may be reproduced in any form other than that in which it was purchased and without the written permission of the author.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  http://www.joyellis.info

  PROLOGUE

  The bright starry night and the crystal-clear moonlight only managed to accentuate the horror inside the lonely Fenland farmhouse on Dovegate Lane.

  Hollow-eyed police officers moved around, most of them working on auto-pilot. They had a job to do and they’d do it, but not one of them wanted to be there.

  And as head of the Serious Crime Unit, DCI Kate Reynard was the first detective to arrive on scene. Her thoughts were no different to any of the others there, but she accepted the disposable all-in-one forensic suit from the constable on the door with a detached air of authority, and she felt rather than heard, a collective sigh of relief that she was about to take command.

  She knew a little of what had happened. Control had told her the basics in an urgent call to her home at just after two that morning.

  Three dead. Husband, wife and five year old son. A small family wiped out; annihilated in a few minutes of madness.

  She walked across the hallway and paused at the bottom of the stairs. So far everything had been so ordinary, so normal. In the small porch she had noted a row of kid’s muddy boots and shoes, all lined up ready for cleaning. There had been a scuffed football, balanced on top of a cardboard box full of old newspapers. The single word ‘Recycle’ had been felt penned in big uneven letters on the side. And there was a child’s scooter; new-ish, well-oiled and obviously looked after. Happy families, she whispered to herself.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  Kate looked back to the doorway and saw her sergeant; DS Jon Summerhill hurriedly signing the incident log.

  ‘Been upstairs yet?’ He asked as he zipped up his forensic suit.

  She shook her head, then pushed a thick swathe of auburn hair up into the paper hood. ‘I thought we’d tackle that little delight together, my friend. If you are ready?’

  Jon nodded. ‘As I’ll ever be.’

  Kate felt a rush of relief that he was with her. There was something about Jon Summerhill; a calmness, a solid reliability maybe? She’d never really pinpointed it, but she knew that whatever it was, it helped at a time like this. And if he felt apprehensive, he hid it well. Kate smiled grimly to herself. She knew from personal experience all the unmentionable horrors that were going round in his head right now, but he was a damned good copper and he had learnt how to cloak his feelings with professionalism.

  She placed her foot on the first step, and thought that this was probably one of the only occasions when she actually regretted having kids of her own. And as she moved on up the stairs, she also found herself considering that a swift change in career might be a good idea too; something more along the lines of a librarian or a florist. Something that didn’t involve a constant relationship, up close and personal, with violent death.

  ‘Rosie and Scott are on their way, they’ll be here in ten.’ said Jon quietly, as he followed close behind her.

  Kate nodded. ‘Then we’ll check this out before they arrive. They’ll have seen some pretty grim RTCs, and probably more than enough un-natural deaths that were well past their sell by dates, but I’m not sure they’ll have come across anything quite like this.’

  ‘Probably not, Guv, but they’ll be okay. They’ll cope, they’re good kids.’

  ‘Good coppers actually. They may look like they’re playing truant from school, but believe it or not Jon, they really are detectives.’ She halted. ‘And I do believe we are procrastinating.’

  Jon pulled a face and nodded. ‘Maybe, but even seasoned old hands like us need to prepare.’

  She knew that he was not religious, but as he stood on that upper landing, he crossed himself then ran his finger in a circle around the invisible cross. It was his little ritual. Something Kate had seen him do a hundred times before. He reminded her of an athlete kissing a crucifix before a major race, or an actor psyching himself up to walk on stage for an audition. ‘Okay, if you’re ready, let’s do this.’

  They found the husband in the main bedroom. After a while Kate gave up trying to count the number of bloody gashes.

  ‘Sustained and vicious attack,’ stated Jon grimly. ‘Manic rage. But he didn’t give in easily, did he?’

  Kate had already seen the defensive wounds. The man’s palms and the insides of his fingers had been cut to shreds where he had grabbed at the knife. One brutal slice had almost severed his right thumb. ‘He must have been first to die. Looks like he was desperately trying to stop the same thing happening to his son?’ She let out a long sigh. ‘But sadly by the look of his injuries, he had a snowflakes chance in hell.’

  Jon looked at her. ‘I cannot believe a woman did this.’

  ‘We’ll get the full picture when all the evidence is in, but I’m afraid there’s no doubt.’ She shook her head. ‘It was his wife who attacked him.’

  Robert Ball, medium build, sandy coloured hair and dressed in faded jeans and a blue polo shirt lay in a twisted heap in a wide pool of blood that had puddled around him on the wooden laminate flooring. Torn pieces of a letter, ripped angrily apart were scattered over and around his body, the bits of white paper floating like a flotilla of tiny paper boats on a red sea.

  Kate wanted to snatch them up and put them back together like some gruesome jigsaw puzzle, but she was too professional to compromise a crime scene. Instead she tried to decipher some of the words, but the blood, almost black in the harsh temporary lighting, was slowly devouring what was left of the ink. She stared at them and realised that these inconsequential looking scraps were probably the cause of the untimely end of the Ball family. A love letter? A demand? A threat? Kate wondered what information written on those pages could have been so terrible to invoke such carnage.

  She straightened up. As always, the enquiry would provide the answers, and not for the first time, they would wonder at the inhumanity that people are capable of. An old mentor, a sergeant when Kate was just a rookie, had taken delight in regularly stating that anyone was capable anything, given a certain set of circumstances. At the time Kate had believed the older man to be cynical and disillusioned by too many years on the Force. But now, two decades down the line, she knew that it was just a simple truth. Since then she’d seen death in a multitude of guises, and so often the perpetrator was an ordinary person, but like her old sergeant had said, they had got caught up in an unusual set of circumstances.

  Forensics moved in and they moved on.

  ‘The boy is the bathroom,’ offered the SOCO, ‘and as soon as you’ve finished we’d like to get him out of there.’

  ‘Has the forensic photographer done his job?’ asked Kate.

  ‘He’s got all he needs, ma’am. We’re just waiting on you.’

  The water in the bath was a soft pinkish colour and wispy traces of whitish soapy foam still clung to the edges of the enamelled steel tub. The room smelt of flowers, mainly of lavender, and Kate vaguely registered that lavender was a marvellous relaxant. Pity it hadn’t worked for young Sam or more to the point, his deranged mother.

  The naked boy lay in the rose-tinted water, his face partly submerged and his hair, blond a
nd wavy, drifted out from his terror-stricken face like a sunshine halo. Kate silently cursed his mother for not having enough compassion left to close her child’s eyes, but she hadn’t, and Kate knew that her brain had just taken a snapshot that would stay in her memory for ever. ‘At least she didn’t slash him to ribbons, like she did her husband.’ she murmured softly, unable to disguise the catch in her voice. ‘Small mercies, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Jon stared from the soaking wet bath mat and the open bottle of children’s shampoo dribbling its contents over the tiled floor, to the torn shower curtain that hung drunkenly at the back of the bath. ‘But like his father, he fought her, didn’t he? He must have been terrified, the poor little soul.’

  Kate left Jon in the bathroom. She’s seen enough. Maybe too much.

  ‘Sleep now, little one,’ she heard him whisper. ‘The angels are with you.’

  By the time Kate got around to looking at the dead woman, her compassion level seemed to have dropped to almost empty. She just stared down at the shot-gun, then at the shattered head with blood matting the dark hair into oily looking wedges, and wondered why.

  She stared around the playroom where they had found Cindy Ball, hunting for signs of what had triggered this once loving wife and mother to massacre her family then take her own life, but Kate saw only indications of love. Nice toys, thick good quality carpet, comfortable furniture and child safety locks on the windows. She knew they’d get the answers soon enough, but at this moment in time she was almost overwhelmed by a terrible sense of waste.

  ‘I wonder…?’ She began speaking, then shut her mouth and frowned.

  Jon was staring down intently at a card game that had been laid out on the floor. Then he looked up at her and she saw that the little colour that he did have in his face had drained to ash grey.

  Concern swept over her. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ She asked.

  His eyes darted around the playroom, and he said, ‘This isn’t the full picture, Kate. Something’s not right.’

  Hearing him address her as Kate was something of a surprise. Jon never called her by her first name unless they were off duty, or in an extremely tough situation. ‘I should say that nothing is right about finding three dead bodies,’ she said carefully.

  ‘What I mean is…’ Jon stopped, then and spun around, checking out the whole room with narrowed eyes. He drew in a deep breath, gathered himself, then pressed his fingers hard to his temples as if he were trying to think.

  Kate just stared at him. Never in all the time had she known him, had she seen her sergeant act so strangely. She knew he picked up on things at crime scenes. He had an uncanny knack for spotting anomalies that everyone else missed. It was one of the reasons that he was so valuable to her team, even if the mess room did label him the Marshland Mentalist. Not that Kate cared; Jon Summerhill was an excellent detective, and time and time again he had proved that she could trust his highly tuned instincts.

  For a while, just seconds in real time, but to Kate it seemed like eons, Jon fought to gather himself together, then he flatly stated, ‘There’s another child here, Guv.’ Jon’s voice sounded controlled, but Kate didn’t miss the slight tremor when he added, ‘And Cindy Ball killed her first.’

  As the last of the black windowed vehicles drew away on their trip to the mortuary, they sat in Kate’s car and tried to talk.

  The second child had been found stuffed into a crawl space that ran under the eaves of the old cottage. She had been about six years old, with blonde curly hair, and the Home Office pathologist had told them that she had been brutally shaken before being strangled.

  ‘You knew?’ Kate asked him eventually.

  ‘All the indications were there,’ replied Jon shortly. ‘The card game set up for two, two half finished glasses of juice, and a teddy bear with a daisy chain around its neck.’ He gave her a weak smile. ‘Tell me, did your boys ever make daisy chains, yet alone decorate a teddy with them?’

  He was trying to sound reasonable, plausible. But somehow it didn’t gel in Kate’s brain. ‘You knew.’ She repeated.

  Jon took a deep breath and shrugged. ‘Just saw the signs I guess, ma’am, and I picked up on them. You know that’s what I do best.’

  He had tried to throw a hint of accusation into his voice but it hadn’t worked, and Kate just sat there, shaking her head slowly from side to side and repeating those two words like a mantra. ‘You knew.’

  Finally Jon looked out of the car window and said nothing.

  Dawn was staining the night sky with streaks of welcome light, but it did nothing to lift the sense of confusion that filled the car. Kate’s head was almost bursting with unspoken questions, then she let out a long breath and said, ‘I’ve known you for four years, Jon Summerhill. You’ve been my sergeant, my right hand, for two of them and I would trust you with my life, but right now, I think that you should trust me, and tell me exactly what’s going on.’

  Although Jon seemed to fight for the right words, nothing actually materialised and he remained uncomfortably mute.

  So Kate just sat and stared at him, patiently waiting.

  Her nickname, behind her back of course, was the Fox, and not just because of the colour of her hair or the fact that her surname was Reynard. Now as she looked unblinkingly at John, she forced herself to become the epitome of her nickname. And hopefully, Jon would soon be feeling like a lone chicken in the coop on a moonless night, with a pair of vulpine glittering eyes watching his every move as the vixen made ready to pounce.

  But still he said nothing.

  ‘Well, if you aren’t going to cough, I’m going to have to start making some educated guesses, aren’t I?’

  He looked at her and she saw something akin to fear in his eyes. But there was no going back now. ‘Have you been like it all your life? I mean, have you always been psychic?’

  And there it was. She had spoken the word out loud.

  For a moment Jon froze, his mouth slightly open, then after a second or two passed, he swallowed and said. ‘They say all children are born that way, they just lose it as they grow up.’ His voice seemed tinged with regret, but Kate also picked up on the strangest elation, as if he were experiencing some sort of unimaginable cathartic freedom.

  ‘But you never lost it?’

  ‘If anything, I’d say it’s getting stronger, ma’am.’

  ‘I see.’ She paused and then smiled, shattering the tension in the car. ‘Well, that answers a shed-load of questions, doesn’t it? No wonder you’re so bloody super-intuitive! And no wonder you ‘pick up’ such a lot of seemingly useful insights that the rest of us manage to miss. All done in the guise of an observant and diligent copper! You’re a clever man, Sergeant Summerhill, until tonight, I only had the faintest inkling!’

  ‘You actually understand this.’ Jon said. It was more a statement than a question.

  Kate laughed. ‘Don’t look so shocked. You’d know better than most that it’s not the kind of thing one brings up in the company of a bunch of hard-arsed policemen, but yes, I’ve seen something like it before. In fact, pass this on to anyone else and you’ll be back on traffic by tea-time, but I’ve practically grown up with it. My God-mother was, well, my mother called it fey, others said she was gifted.’

  Jon took a long deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘I’ve always known that one day the cat would come crawling out of the bag and my mind conjures up a dozen different scenarios that might follow. But this certainly wasn’t one of them.’ He looked at her earnestly; a soft light shining brightly in his dark brown eyes. ‘This is an answered prayer; the only wish that I would have asked of Aladdin and his magic lamp. I just want to use my gift to the full, as a detective.’

  ‘Jon,’ whispered Kate, as threads of dawn lit up the interior of her car. Endless possibilities were opening out before her, like glorious flowers in the sunlight. ‘Jon, are you willing to use your talent?’

  Jon clearly knew exactly what she was thinking. He knew better t
han anyone that his mysterious glimpses of the truth, of light through the darkness could be the most powerful investigative tool imaginable. And with Kate as his ally, it could belong to their team.

  ‘Don’t answer immediately.’ Kate laid her hand on his arm, ‘And for the present, this stays strictly between you and me. I have an awful lot of thinking to do about your.., your unusual talent and how we could use it.’

  ‘Believe me; I’d want it no other way, ma’am.’ Jon breathed again, and a smile finally found its way to his lips. ‘I think the mess room has enough derogatory names for me already without adding Mystic Meg to the list.’

  TWO YEARS LATER

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kate’s eyes flew open on the first ring of her mobile phone. She grabbed it from the bedside table, praying that she would be able to answer it without waking David.

  ‘Ma’am? It’s Sergeant Danny Page here. Sorry for the early call, but we’ve just received a report of a body on the beach over at Dawnsmere.’

  Kate’s jaw clamped. Her present investigation involved a missing teenager. ‘Body, Sergeant?’

  There was the slightest pause. ‘Yes, DCI Reynard, and I’m afraid it is a young woman, although that’s all we know until someone can get out there. I’ve got two cars responding, but I’m assuming you would like to deal with this?’

  Kate was already out of bed. ‘I’m on my way, Sergeant. Would you please alert DS Summerhill for me and ask him to meet me at the scene?’ She kept her voice low. ‘And you’d better get the pathologist and a Soco down there.’

  ‘Consider it done, ma’am.’

  She closed the phone, took a swift and grateful glance at the unmoving shape of her husband, and began pulling a random selection of clothes from her wardrobe. Somehow he’d managed to sleep through the Great Storm, but you never quite knew with David.

  As her fingers closed thankfully around the bedroom door handle, she heard a low groan and her heart sank.