Perfect Crime

by Helen Fields

  Ava rang off and went to find DS Tripp. She located him in a new-looking barn a couple of fields away, where officers were hastily erecting floodlights and removing articles in evidence bags.

  Taking the ladder to the upper area of the barn, Ava went to see what all the fuss was about. A couple of bin bags filled with food wrappers and general debris had been cut open for inspection and four large water canisters were stacked in a corner, mostly empty. A few tatty blankets had been left, together with shoes that were more holes than leather, and clothes certainly not designed for Scottish weather.

  ‘Several people living here for some time, we reckon,’ Tripp said, appearing behind her.

  ‘The farmer must have known. Most likely they were getting shelter in return for cheap labour,’ Ava said.

  ‘So it’s either the homeless, kids or people who’ve fallen on hard times, maybe criminals with nowhere to go and no other offers of work …’

  ‘Or illegal immigrants,’ she finished for him. ‘We’ll need DNA from all the items to identify the people who were here. There’s no dust settled on any of this, and no spider’s webs either, so it looks like they left recently and in a hurry.’

  ‘Do you suppose one of them’s responsible, ma’am?’ Tripp asked.

  ‘Anything’s possible, Sergeant. What I need to establish right now is a motive. The body’s been removed to the mortuary. Thought you might want to do a walk-through of the rest of the property with me.’

  They retraced their steps back to the house, avoiding the units checking every inch of the dirt track for fresh tyre prints.

  Ava tried the front door. It was locked and bolted from the inside. All downstairs windows were intact and also locked.

  ‘So the killer came in through the back door, but there’s no evidence of force being used. Either the victim let him in, or he just walked straight in when it was unlocked,’ Tripp said. ‘No gun in the cabinet, so we’re assuming the one that was found on the floor next to the body belonged to the farmer.’ Tripp’s phone rang. ‘Excuse me, I should take this,’ he said, moving into the lounge.

  Ava took the stairs slowly, keeping her gloved hands off the bannister to avoid smudging any prints, looking at the carpet as she went. Here and there were dark red drips, but the only violence seemed to have taken place downstairs. What cause did the killer have to go upstairs after the event? Surely he’d want to exit the house as quickly as possible. The gunshot could have been heard from quite a distance at night. He was also contaminating the scene more than was necessary, something he’d been careful not to do at the other crime scenes, if – and she accepted it was a big if – he was the same man who’d killed the other victims.

  At the top of the stairs, she paused. Either the killer had been looking for something, although robbery was clearly not the primary motive given the feathers, or he’d been spooked. It was an old house and entirely possible that squeaking floorboards had got the better of his imagination, but then there’d been a burned apple pie that the forensics team had put on the kitchen table. A large one. Too large for one man to eat alone. The farmer hadn’t been skinny but he was far from obese. Certainly not a whole-pie-in-one-evening kind of figure.

  Ava took the rooms one by one, clockwise from the top of the stairs, checking each cupboard, looking for signs of inhabitants. In the main bedroom she noticed the flowery bedspread and something else in a bedside cabinet. Tucked in the drawer along with a fly-fishing magazine and a torch was a half-used pack of condoms. Someone had been here, regularly enough for Jon Moffat to have planned for sexual encounters. She squashed the memory of when she’d last been looking for the same items, and the flash of pain that took her unawares with it, and got on with the job in hand. Nothing like a brutal murder to help get priorities straight, she thought.

  In the final room, Ava opened the built-in wardrobe, noting the bloody handprint inside the door and calling down to the Scenes of Crime officers to come and photograph it. Stepping inside and to the very back, she heard a hollow thud beneath her foot.

  ‘Tripp,’ she called, kicking the bedding out of the way. ‘Guest bedroom, now!’

  She banged hard on the floor. In spite of the carpeting, the hollow sound of it was obvious compared to the solidity of the rest of the area. Running her finger around the edge of the carpet, she hit a loop of electrical wire. Clever. Hard to notice. Would have looked like a stray lead to anyone not looking for it.

  Tucking her fingers into the loop, Ava pulled upwards. The floorboards had been nailed together and a trapdoor cut, carpet and all. Beneath it was darkness. Ava took the steep steps, one after the other, which seemed, ridiculously, to be leading to the outer wall of the house.

  ‘What is it?’ Tripp shouted from the hallway.

  ‘Trapdoor. Come into the wardrobe,’ Ava shouted. ‘A sort of hidey-hole; although this type of property wouldn’t have needed one, historically speaking, and this was made recently enough to stick modern carpet to it. It doesn’t seem to lead anywhere …’

  ‘Ma’am!’ Tripp shouted as her last word turned into a scream he heard half from within the bedroom and half though the open window.

  Jumping down into the hole, he found her hanging out of a miniature door that opened into the cold clear air. Tripp pulled her back and she landed roughly on top of him, at the base of the steps.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked, panting.

  ‘I’d be better if I could stop nearly falling off high walls,’ she puffed. ‘What in God’s name is this?’

  ‘Stay there and hold on,’ Tripp said. ‘Wait until you hear my voice to open that door again.’

  By the time Ava had recovered her breath, Tripp was shouting for her to open the door. She did so tentatively, pushing it with her feet and keeping well away from the edge.

  ‘There’s a lot of latticework with ivy all over it,’ he shouted up. ‘But I think there’s a proper structure beneath, more like a ladder.’

  ‘So the farmer was expecting company at some point,’ Ava said. ‘Which explains why our killer went upstairs after finishing his business with Mr Moffat. If he heard footsteps, he’d have had to make sure there was no one else in the house. By the time he got up here, our potential witness was already in this hole and ready to climb the ladder.’

  ‘And they’d been trained to climb it. We walked right next to it to get in the back door and didn’t notice it. No one could have found this by chance.’

  ‘There was a packet of condoms in the bedroom,’ Ava said. ‘Our victim might have been unmarried, but I don’t think he was entirely single.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Tripp confirmed. ‘I just got off the phone with the local pub landlady. She got a call early this morning from the farmer’s mobile, knew the number as the caller ID came up on her phone. It was a woman’s voice telling her Mr Moffat was dead and here’s the interesting thing … The accent was definitely not Scottish or English. When pushed, the best she could say was that it sounded like an African accent; although the caller said few words then rang off.’

  ‘We’ve got a witness,’ Ava said. ‘About bloody time.’

  A couple of hours later, the incident room was packed. Ava let Tripp handle the briefing then took questions.

  ‘Why are we assuming it’s the work of the Hawksmith–Shozo murderer?’ was the inevitable first line of questioning.

  ‘Because the latest victim’s doctor has just confirmed he received long-term treatment for depression, including several periods when he was considered to be an active suicide risk. We’re currently awaiting a breakdown of the resources Jon Moffat accessed and the date of his most recent contact with psychiatric services. Mr Moffat was badly burned in a fire in his parents’ barn in his early twenties.

  ‘He recovered physically after several surgeries, but it’s fair to say his life was changed forever. The resulting depression was something doctors foresaw, but his mental health deteriorated over a period of years when he found it difficult – impossible, in fact –
to find a partner. Until now.’

  ‘No known enemies?’ DC Janet Monroe queried.

  ‘We haven’t had enough time to check that thoroughly, but the local landlady says he kept himself to himself, was popular enough when he went in there for a quiet beer,’ Tripp said. ‘His bank account was in credit. No mortgage on the farm. No red flags.’

  ‘What’s the deal with the feathers?’ someone else asked.

  ‘Might be a personal reference to do with the farmer himself,’ Ava suggested. ‘Or a progression, something in the killer’s psyche, maybe living out a fantasy. We’ll take another look at that once the ornithologist has identified the feathers for us. There were no other feathers found in the house or any of the barns, though, so it looks as though they were taken to the house deliberately. It’s highly deranged behaviour by someone who’s not bothered by getting up close and personal with another body, very much the same as in the previous cases.’

  ‘So we have to wait until we locate the witness who called in the crime to the landlady?’ Monroe asked.

  ‘That’s one line of enquiry,’ Ava replied.

  ‘What if the caller just happened to find the body but has no useful information about the murderer? At the rate these killings are happening we could easily have another victim by the time we locate the caller,’ Monroe said. ‘We have to draw the murderer – him or her – out.’

  ‘There was a bloody hand mark on the inside wall of the cupboard in he farmhouse and the size of it suggests the perpetrator was male. It was Moffat’s blood but the killer was wearing gloves so we don’t have any prints.’

  ‘Him, then,’ Monroe continued. ‘I said it before, but his behaviour’s escalating at an unprecedented rate. I think we should be more proactive.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Ava said.

  ‘It needs to be something public and we’ll let the media get hold of it organically, keep it as credible as possible. Martello Court would be a good location. It’s the highest residential building in Edinburgh: twenty-three floors, two hundred and ten feet high. We stage it as a suicide threat in progress, drag it out, put cameras in place and wait to see who turns up. We’ve already got a lot of social media from the Stephen Berry attempted suicide. Maybe we’ll find an overlap, or the same interested professionals.’

  ‘We’d need a volunteer and they’d have to be willing to be monitored to protect their safety until we had a definite suspect in play. It would be a substantial intrusion involving possible danger.’ Ava looked around the room for raised hands.

  ‘I wouldn’t have suggested it if I weren’t willing to volunteer myself,’ Janet Monroe said quickly. ‘It makes sense. I’m the newest member of the team. I’ve never been involved in any police media work, plus I’ve been on the Jenson–Western investigation until now, so I haven’t been out to any crime scenes or spoken to any witnesses. I can talk about having a young baby and pretend I’m a single mother, so all sorts of potential for assuming I’m under pressure, compounded by being in a racial minority in Scotland, like Osaki Shozo. Gives me loads to say to whoever comes to my aid.’

  Ava sighed. Janet Monroe was undoubtedly intellectually equipped to pull it off, but there was something unsettling about using a mother with a baby still not old enough to walk as bait.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Monroe said directly.

  ‘What?’ Ava asked.

  ‘If I were male, would you have a problem with me volunteering?’

  ‘I need more time to think about it,’ Ava deflected. ‘It might be better to use an undercover specialist from a different area.’

  ‘You’ll have to brief them and get them up to date. I know what I’m looking for. I’ve read the file on every victim and I’m more than aware of the risks. My partner’ll take our baby out of the flat. He has family in Edinburgh. Let me do this,’ Monroe insisted.

  Ava looked at her. Monroe could handle herself and Ava knew it. She was a good officer with great instincts.

  ‘All right. Tripp, Monroe, my office in ten minutes. We’ll need to complete risk assessments and set up surveillance. And I’ll need the superintendent to greenlight it. Confidential liaison with fire and paramedic units so they’re on standby. Armed police to confirm they can be stationed outside your property on a rotating shift basis. Let’s move.’

  Pax Graham caught her as she was striding towards her office.

  ‘Ma’am, quick update. The blood we found inside Gilroy Western’s engine where the brakes had been cut. We’re still working up a full DNA profile, but we’ve had confirmation from the lab that it’s from a woman.’

  ‘Gilroy Western’s escort?’ Ava asked.

  ‘Lively’s traced her through the number we found on Mr Western’s phone. He’s bringing her in as a person of interest now. We’ll ask her for a DNA sample to exclude her from enquiries.’

  ‘Well done,’ Ava said. ‘Update me tonight? I’m expecting to be out on an operation all afternoon, but I’ll text you when I’m free.’

  Back in her office, Ava let herself fall into her chair. It occurred to her that she could let Callanach know straight away that the perpetrator might be Gilroy Western’s well-paid euphemistically termed ‘girlfriend’, but decided it would be better to wait until she had more definite news. Between them, Graham and Lively would get a sense for whether or not the woman had anything to do with it. She could call Callanach later. And if that was an excuse to delay a task she wasn’t feeling up to, then who could blame her?

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  15 March

  Janet Monroe stood on the top of what locals had affectionately dubbed Terror Tower several years earlier, when Muirhouse was the go-to area for scoring drugs, selecting your weapon of choice, or slipping a dubious man a bundle of tens to beat up the bastard your girl was seeing behind your back. Monroe had taken a hammer and broken the locks that would otherwise have prevented her from accessing the roof, making sure she was wearing trainers she could stand in for a lengthy period before her feet were screaming at her. She was careful to make herself seen from the ground without risking a tumble in the wind.

  Nothing else was faked. The police were not to attend, at least not publicly, until a bona fide concerned member of the public made the call. After that, paramedics would be made aware and suicide prevention services would be brought in. By the time the first police car pulled up, a small crowd had gathered and was staring up at the building.

  Ava and Tripp were in a parallel residence, looking out over the growing crowd, checking that the cameras stationed at six different points wouldn’t miss a single onlooker. Plainclothes officers were to join the crowd at timed intervals, all wearing wires and recording conversations. Monroe herself had a more discreet transmission unit sewn into a hoodie under her coat.

  ‘She must be freezing,’ Ava muttered. ‘I can’t believe the super signed off on this.’

  ‘First media van arriving now,’ Tripp said. ‘They’ll have to be broadcasting with a time delay in case Janet actually jumps – I mean, not that she’ll jump, but if this was real – it would only be a thirty-second buffer. The images should be all over the Internet shortly and we’ll be just in time to catch the local evening news.’

  ‘We’ve been avoiding the press with this story,’ Ava said as she scanned the front of the building with binoculars. ‘All suicides run the risk of encouraging others to do the same thing. Why is that? Wouldn’t you think other people would look and say to themselves, I really don’t want that to be me next? I need to get help, change my situation, see my doctor, anything but that.’

  ‘That’s logic talking, ma’am,’ Tripp said. ‘Mental health isn’t logical. Depression doesn’t follow rules. Misery loves company is a much more realistic way of looking at this. I can see how it would be comforting to know someone else was feeling just as bad as you, and seeing what they’d decided to do about it could be kind of … inspiring, I guess.’

  ‘You’re not making me feel any more positive abou
t this operation, Sergeant,’ Ava said, picking up a radio and buzzing through to the uniformed officer with overall ground control. ‘Move the onlookers further back from the building’s perimeter. I want a larger safe zone and I need the prople spread thinner so we can get a clear shot of every single face in the crowd.’

  The result was instantaneous – four monitors in Ava’s surveillance room immediately filled with clearer shots of individuals. Most were displaying the normal, expected human emotions. Hands were being pressed to mouths, there were tears, parents were shielding the eyes of children – although it would have been better still if the children had been removed entirely from the vicinity – and there was concerned speculation being exchanged.

  Then there were the amateur photographers, taking stills, even footage, presumably in the hope of catching those last fateful moments. Wouldn’t that be something to show your mates at the pub in the evening? A few of the better-prepared onlookers were standing around with cans of beer, settling in for the long haul. There was grinning, chatting, and some money was changing hands with a man who was writing slips of paper in return.

  ‘What the fuck … are they laying bets?’ Ava screeched. ‘Tripp, get a camera on that piece of shit in the brown coat with the orange scarf. I want him under arrest before this is over. I don’t care what else happens today, no one in the city is going to profit from running the odds on whether or not a young woman kills herself.’

  ‘Can’t do it, ma’am. They’ll know we were watching and word gets round here almost as fast as a dose of the clap.’

  ‘Jesus, Tripp, you’ve been spending way too much time with DS Lively,’ Ava muttered. ‘Fine. I want an ID made, though. I expect to see that bastard picked up on something in the next month. I don’t care if it’s just having insufficient tread on his tyres.’