Helen had almost reached the end of the road now. Had she left her bike out of sight to avoid drawing attention to herself? If so, she was wasting her time. This was about her – this had always been about her.
Suddenly she slipped from view, disappearing around the corner and away from him. But their meeting was not far away now.
You can run, Helen. But you can’t hide.
106
The Incident Room was deserted. Sanderson had left it until late to return to base, hoping that the rest of the team would have called it a day, given that there were no breaking leads. As she teased the handle of the main door, she was pleased to find it locked – she didn’t want to have to explain her presence here. Letting herself in quickly, she secured the door behind her. She couldn’t risk being disturbed, given what she was about to do.
Picking her way through the desks, she made her way to Helen’s office. Her boss always operated an open-door policy and never bothered locking her office. Helen liked to be one of the foot soldiers and was at pains not to erect false barriers between her and the team. This was useful now, as Sanderson walked into her office unimpeded, but it made her betrayal all the worse. Whatever she thought of Helen now, she had always been an inspirational figure in Sanderson’s life.
Crossing to the desk, she opened one drawer, then another. But it was as she opened the bottom drawer that she found what she was after. Helen had long straight hair and always kept a hairbrush in her office, in case she suddenly found herself facing top brass or, worse, the press. Slipping on latex gloves, Sanderson picked up the brush and carefully extracted three hairs from the bristles. Dropping the hairs into a small evidence bag, she sealed her haul and placing the brush back in the drawer, pushed it firmly to.
Twenty minutes later, she was buzzing herself into the Police Scientific Services building. It was a short hop up to the lab on the third floor, where she found Meredith Walker waiting for her.
‘This had better be good,’ Meredith said on seeing her. ‘I’m missing First Dates to be here.’
‘New lead in the Elder case. DNA source. We need it done –’
‘Asap, I know.’
The forensics officer turned to begin her work.
‘Oh and Meredith …’
She turned to look at Sanderson once more, intrigued by her serious tone.
‘It’s for my eyes only.’
107
They ate in silence. Jane was well tuned to his moods and could tell when Jonathan had had a bad day at work. Her default tactic in those situations was not to probe or hassle him; instead she would hand him a glass of cold white wine and get on with the business of cooking their dinner.
She had cooked one of his favourites – linguini alle vongole – but he could barely taste it tonight. He was on auto-pilot, twirling the pasta slowly round his fork then lifting it to his mouth, barely conscious of what he was eating. He didn’t care a jot for the consequences of his actions today – he felt confident he could ride out any formal complaint Helen might make. It was the betrayal that burnt. He had wanted her like he hadn’t wanted any woman for years and she had pushed him away. Why had she toyed with him if she wasn’t interested?
Gardam finished eating and pushed his bowl away. Looking up, he caught Jane staring at him. She’d obviously been concerned when he returned home with two deep scratches on his cheek, but seemed to accept his story of a jogging accident. Now, though, Gardam wondered if she was having her doubts. The scratches were long, straight and clean. Would you expect that type of injury from a low-hanging branch? The question was whether she would respond to these doubts, asking him outright. He wanted her to ask. He would tell her that he hadn’t slept with another woman, but he wanted to. He would tell Jane that he found her predictable, bourgeois and anodyne – both in the bedroom and out. He would tell her that their marriage was comfortable and routine, characterized by his career ambition and her appetite for a nice, middle-class lifestyle, but that when you boiled things down, when you got down to primal needs and desires, she meant little to him. Helen was the woman who occupied his thoughts now. Despite her savage rejection, she remained there still – in his brain, in his gut, but worst of all in his heart.
108
It was nearly midnight and the air was biting cold. Helen walked briskly through the trees, working her way to the deepest part of the wood. She had come this route many times during her runs and knew it like the back of her hand. She was following a path that few knew of, which gave her some comfort, some respite from the paranoia now gripping her. Here at least she would be safe.
Angelique had been left for her to discover. This was a new phase in a game that was clearly directed at her. All three victims were known to Helen – she had used their services and allowed them to see a part of her that no one else did. Was jealousy driving someone to destroy these people? Or something else? And what did the text message sent by Angelique’s killer summoning Helen imply? That she was being set up? Or just that she was meant to know? Perhaps the killer had just lost patience with the real target and had decided to bring her into the game.
Time would tell, but if Helen wanted to survive, she would belatedly have to get smart. Pulling her private mobile phone from her jacket, she flipped open the back and removed the SIM card. She looked around for any signs that she was being watched, but seeing nothing, removed her lighter from her jeans and ignited the flame. It was an oddly beautiful sight – the plastic melting slowly as the metal chip of the SIM card blackened and distorted. Holding it in her gloved hand until it was destroyed, Helen dropped it to the ground, into a small hole she’d dug with the heel of her boot. Kicking earth over the hole, she then moved away quickly, clutching the phone in her hand.
On the edge of the woods, she hesitated. A couple were wandering home across the Common, arm in arm. Helen waited until they had disappeared, before venturing on to open ground. She had always felt at home here, but now she felt exposed and vulnerable. Upping her pace, she soon found herself sprinting, keen to get this over with.
Within minutes, she was by the cemetery lake. Checking the coast was clear, Helen pulled the body of her phone from her pocket and threw it as hard as she could, watching it arc through the sky before landing in the water with a splash. The noise echoed briefly then died away.
Helen had already turned on her heel and was marching towards the southern exit. She had to regroup now, which meant heading back to her flat. She would have to search every inch of it and secure every lock before she would feel safe, but she would do whatever was necessary. It was her home after all – her only safe space now – and she was damned if she was going to be driven from it.
109
Charlie held her hand to her mouth, sickened by the sight in front of her. It shouldn’t have made a difference to her that their third victim was a woman, but it did. Charlie could see the naked terror frozen on her pretty face, she could feel her desperation to breathe, to live, even as the oxygen in her lungs ran out. Her nostrils were dilated, her mouth wide open – one almost felt she might lurch back into life suddenly with one big breath. But her lifeless eyes, staring monotonously at the low ceiling, gave the lie to that.
She went by the professional name of Angelique, but her real name was Amy Fawcett. The flat was registered in her name and the imprint of her real life could be seen in framed photos hung up in her private space at the back of the flat. She was a musician and performance artist, who paid the bills by her extracurricular work at night. She didn’t appear to be a prostitute – there were no condoms in the flat, no history of arrest – in fact this work appeared to be a sideline, which made her death all the more tragic. There was a photo next to her bed of a young Amy gripping a viola awkwardly under her chin. It had brought tears to Charlie’s eyes when she first saw it, such was the guileless innocence and optimism of the image, and she’d had to absent herself from the team for a few moments. She needed a break – she realized that now – but quite when and how she
would get one was another matter.
They were still in the midst of a major investigation with no clear suspect in mind. Charlie had crunched the credit card details and sent them to Helen, but progress was incremental rather than revelatory and Charlie had the uneasy feeling that things were starting to go south. Normally, Helen would have been all over this, stalking the crime scene, bullying the forensics team and coordinating the uniformed officers on the street. But she was notable by her absence this morning. Charlie hadn’t been able to raise her on her landline or mobile. Was she sick? Surely not, Helen was never sick.
She had tried Sanderson, thinking it might be wise to defer to her greater experience, but she couldn’t get hold of her either and was told by one of the girls at the station that the DS was ‘unavailable’ and ‘on operational duties’. What those were Charlie couldn’t fathom – what could be more important than a triple murder?
It fell to Charlie then to marshall the troops. This should have felt exciting – calling the shots at a murder scene was the natural culmination of her career thus far. But the gnawing uncertainty that something bigger was going on, from which she was excluded, was sapping her energy and optimism. Equally debilitating was the sight in front of her – a beautiful and talented spirit whose life had been brutally cut short.
110
Helen hadn’t wanted to leave Angelique like that, but she’d had no choice. She could hardly call it in, so instead she had deliberately left the front door open. She had no doubt that one of Angelique’s neighbours would notice and investigate further. It wasn’t ideal and might delay her discovery for a few hours, but there was no other way. Helen couldn’t risk incriminating herself and, besides, she had work to do.
She had lowered the blind and turned off her phone. The whole of the kitchen table was covered in papers and files – the sum total of their work on these murders so far. She had the strong sense that they had been looking the wrong way the whole time, guided to do so by a killer who was organized, diligent and determined. Helen blamed herself – she had been wilfully blind to the growing evidence in front of her, burying her personal connection to the victims because it was inconvenient and unsettling. By retrieving her private phone, by summoning her to the third murder, the killer had let it be known that he would not let her involvement with Jake, Max and the unfortunate Angelique remain hidden.
Helen had a growing sense of who might be responsible, but she refused to let paranoia guide her thinking. She had to follow the evidence, focusing on the choice of victims, the manner of their deaths and the way their killer had gone about organizing these murders. The devil was in the detail in these cases and Helen returned once more now to Charlie’s credit card searches.
This was their killer’s only weak point, the one area where he might show his hand. They now had a third victim to work with and two new instruments of torture – Japanese soft cord bondage ties and a ball gag – which had presumably been purchased for the occasion.
Helen knew that their perpetrator favoured online bondage retailers so, plugging into the police network via remote access, she started to run the searches. She eschewed the chain sex shops in favour of the more boutique operations. And before long she found what she was looking for – the necessary items paid for by a Geoffrey Plough, an 87-year-old former teacher, now living in Shirley. He was an unlikely recipient for S&M products, but more telling still was the fact that the delivery address did not match Plough’s. The items had instead been delivered to a vacant retail outlet in Woolston.
Helen didn’t hesitate now, emailing Plough’s bank and using her name and reputation in the subsequent phone call to persuade the manager to release the necessary information to her. Moments later, her home printer was spewing out Plough’s debit card activity for the last three months.
Helen was excited to see that the list of transactions was fairly short. Whereas the other two credit card victims were keen shoppers, spending frequently at a large number of stores and sites, Plough was parsimonious. He presumably didn’t have much in the way of income, given his meagre spending, and he didn’t seem to shop online, preferring face-to-face transactions. He was also a man who didn’t like to go too far afield. Most of his purchases were made locally in Shirley and he was clearly a repeat customer. One location particularly stood out – one he seemed to visit daily. Wilkinson’s on Park Street.
Helen knew that Wilkinson’s had figured on the other fraud victims’ transaction lists and she pulled them from the files now. Her finger ran down one, then the next and sure enough both had been regular shoppers at the same store.
Which is where Helen was heading now. If she was right, the answer to this deadly game of riddles was waiting for her there.
111
Sanderson paced up and down, fervently wishing she were a smoker or a nail biter. But she was neither – never had been – so there was nothing to do but wait.
The divers had been in the lake for nearly twenty minutes and Sanderson had by now got used to the strange, repetitive rhythm of their work. Dive, resurface, discuss, dive, resurface, discuss … Each time they came back up, she was convinced that this would be the breakthrough she needed. And each time she saw that they were empty-handed another little part of her died.
This was a massive gamble on her part. She had gone over Gardam’s head straight to the Chief Constable. It had been hard enough to get him to agree to surveillance, it was harder still to get them to agree to the expense of a dive. But in the end the Chief Constable had agreed that there were grounds for concern and Sanderson’s decisiveness initially appeared to have paid dividends. Helen Grace had had a five-person team on her as she made her way across Southampton Common. They had lost her initially as she disappeared in the depths of the woods, but a pair of young officers posing as lovers had picked her up again a little later on, as she emerged back on to open ground.
Sanderson had been beyond relieved at this news – she’d feared Helen was on to them and had deliberately lost her tail – and had radioed another member of the team to watch her from a safe distance. This officer had clearly seen Helen throw something in the lake and from then on Sanderson hadn’t stood still, petitioning the Chief Constable for a dive, detailing more people to the surveillance effort and drawing DS McAndrew into her confidence to run some further checks.
Standing by the side of the lake, a brisk autumnal wind whipping around her, she wondered whether she had made a mistake. What if the item that Helen had discarded was something else entirely, something personal and unrelated to the case or, worse than that, merely a piece of rubbish. She shuddered at the thought of how she would explain that to her paymasters.
A shout made her look up. One of the divers was signalling that he’d found something and was returning to the shore. Sanderson set off towards him and moments later she was in possession of a mobile phone, neatly encased in an evidence bag. She didn’t recognize it but it could be Helen’s – there was a lot they didn’t know about her boss, it appeared. Slipping on gloves, she opened the back of the phone, but there was no SIM card inside. Sealing the bag, Sanderson now pulled her phone from her pocket and called McAndrew – even without the SIM card there was lots they could do with the phone’s memory, the serial number and so on. Concluding her call, she handed it to a colleague to ferry back to Southampton Central and resumed her position on the edge of the lake, hopeful that there might yet be more discoveries.
They were inching forward, but painfully slowly and Sanderson wondered how long it would be before Helen smelt a rat. Time was ticking and Sanderson knew her case against Helen would have to be bulletproof before she made her move. If she fudged the execution or, worse still, was just plain wrong, it wouldn’t be Helen’s neck on the block – it would be hers.
112
‘Check again.’
Helen virtually barked her order at the startled manager. Peter Banyard, the new manager of the Park Street Wilkinson’s, was not used to dealing with police officers
, but he knew bad manners when he saw them and bridled at the request.
‘I’m more than happy to check again, Inspector, but I can assure you that this is the complete list of all our employees.’
Helen ran her eye down them again. Jeff Armstrong, Terry Slater, Joanne Hinton, Anne Duggan, Ian McGregor … There was nobody here she recognized, no one who might be relevant.
‘Could these names be fake?’
‘Of course not,’ the aggrieved manager responded. ‘We check their ID, get National Insurance numbers, their bank details –’
‘How far does this list go back?’ Helen interrupted.
‘Eighteen months.’
‘Ok, I’ll need a list going back five years, everything you’ve got.’
‘Then I’ll need a warrant. I think we’ve already gone way beyond the call of duty –’
‘You’ll have one before the end of the day. Thank you for your time.’
Helen was already halfway out of the door, heading fast for the store exit. The fraud victims had all shopped here for several years, so it was possible their credit and debit card details had been garnered some time back. And yet … she had only known Paine for eighteen months and Angelique considerably less than that. This felt recent and Helen knew that she was missing something significant. Their killer was still out there, thinking, plotting, waiting for his moment to strike.
113
‘Amy Fawcett’s body is currently at the mortuary – Jim Grieves is working on a more accurate time of death –’
‘But …’ Sanderson interrupted, wishing McAndrew would get to the point.
‘But I’ve run the Automatic Number Plate Recognition and DI Grace’s bike was in the vicinity of Fawcett’s flat last night.’
‘What do you mean, “in the vicinity”?’
Little Boy Blue: DI Helen Grace 5 (A DI Helen Grace Thriller) Page 21