Killing by Colours

by Wonny Lea

  Martin hardly heard the end of Superintendent Bryant’s sentence as he was incensed by the suggestion that his team was considered to be second-rate and he made no bones about saying so. ‘Say what you like about me, I’m only too aware of how you think I match up to some of your previous DCIs, but don’t you dare accuse my team of being second-rate. They have worked day and night for the past three weeks and came tantalisingly close to preventing a murder today. I won’t have a bad bloody word said against any one of them – not from you or anyone else – do you hear me?’

  The superintendent was incandescent with rage. ‘Do I hear you? What do you mean, do I hear you? Do you realise who you are talking to? If you weren’t in the middle of a triple murder investigation I would suspend you for insubordination.’

  ‘Feel free,’ said Martin. ‘While you’re at it, bring back one of your old cronies and let’s see if some of their slipshod methods work as well today as they did all those years ago. I think you’ll find that time’s moved on – it’s scientific evidence and proper detective work that solves crimes nowadays, not brute force and witness manipulation.’

  The two men faced one another, both their tempers coming to a boil, and then almost simultaneously they realised that PC Lyons had not felt able to walk past them, and had heard every word of their heated exchange. He stood there sheepishly, sincerely wishing he hadn’t been present.

  Martin came to his rescue. ‘Thanks for bringing me back,’ he said in a voice that was now calm. ‘I would be grateful if you could ensure that everyone knows about the 3 p.m. briefing. I’m expecting all personnel who have had anything to do with any of the murders to be there, so contact people at home or wherever but bring them all in. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’

  Grateful for the opportunity to get away, PC Lyons moved quickly up the steps at the back of the car park and left the two CID officers to face one another.

  The superintendent was the first to speak. ‘I will take advice on this,’ he said. ‘Not only have you shown complete disrespect for a senior officer, but you have done so in the presence of someone who is a mere PC.’

  Martin looked at Bryant in total disbelief. How on earth was he supposed to have any respect for someone who referred to the very foundation of the police force as a ‘mere PC’?

  He forced down the anger he was feeling and went for the moral high ground. ‘I look forward to the results of the advice you get regarding my conduct, but for now I have work to do so if you’ll please excuse me … sir.’

  Martin turned on his heels and followed the direction that PC Lyons had taken. He wondered if Superintendent Bryant would follow him but he heard a car door slam and the sound of an engine starting up. He sighed with relief. His spat with the super was possibly years overdue and he knew there would be consequences, but for now he really did have work to do.

  Does losing your temper make you hungry? All Martin knew was that he was suddenly starving and he made his way to the staff café. As it was Saturday there were none of the usual tempting smells of Iris’ cooking, but to be fair to her she did fill the vending machines every Friday evening and there was a good choice of sandwiches and wraps available. Martin chose one such item labelled ‘Croque Monsieur’ and blasted it for a couple of minutes in the microwave, while he used a different vending machine and managed to get a cup of strong black coffee.

  The cheese and ham toastie had an exciting foreign name but Martin thought that it didn’t quite live up to the ones enjoyed by Aunt Pat and himself when they had sampled a genuine Croque Monsieur at one of the pavement cafes in Paris. Still, it filled the gap in his stomach, and he was tempted to go for another one when Matt and Helen walked in.

  ‘I’m not sure why,’ said Matt, ‘but I always feel a bit guilty doing such mundane things as eating when some poor sod has been murdered.’

  ‘We’ve all got to eat,’ said Helen, ‘but I know what you mean. It makes it even worse for me if I start to think that somewhere out there could be a family waiting for a husband or a father to come home and we know that it isn’t going to happen.’

  Martin picked up on what Helen had said. ‘Have we had any joy identifying the owner of the Vauxhall Corsa?’

  Matt nodded. ‘The details are waiting for us upstairs, but we thought we’d grab a bite to eat first and then be fit to get stuck in for the rest of the day.’

  Martin couldn’t argue with Matt’s thinking as it mirrored his own. He decided to supplement what he had already eaten with a ham salad sandwich and a packet of shortbread biscuits and finally felt satisfied. Helen and Matt, armed with a variety of sandwiches from the vending machine, brought over another cup of coffee for him and they all sat eating, drinking, and catching up on the past hour or so.

  Helen began. ‘Meg and Laura took us to the spot where they had seen the killer’s car parked, and it’s now cordoned off and has a police presence as Alex wants to check it out in more detail later. We knocked doors in the immediate vicinity but the only person who saw anything was a nine-year-old girl. Her mother told us that it is only over the past two months that the daughter Molly has been allowed to take their dog out for a walk on her own. Today the girl had only been gone ten minutes when her mother heard her return.’

  ‘At first the mother, Mrs Pearson, thought her daughter had come back because of the rain but she knew different when she found her daughter crying in the kitchen. It apparently took some time before the daughter would tell her mother why she was upset. Eventually she said that she had seen a man crossing the road and coming towards her and he had blood over his clothes. She said the he saw she had noticed him and he kicked her dog.’

  Matt interjected. ‘We spoke to Molly and she was more upset about the man’s treatment of her dog than the sight of the blood but she was absolutely certain it was blood. She told us it was just like when she had a nose bleed and it all gushed out.

  ‘The timing fits perfectly but unfortunately she isn’t able to tell us anything new. She can confirm that he was wearing a black baseball cap and carrying some sort of bag but nothing else. For a nine-year-old she was very sensible, and absolutely adamant that she had not seen his face. She said she wouldn’t even want to see the face of a man who kicked animals, and that was when she started crying again.’

  ‘He’s the animal,’ commented Helen. ‘It makes me feel furious when I think how close we got to stopping him today.’

  Martin nodded in agreement. ‘Yes, but there’s still every chance that we will catch him this time, and at least we will be able to put a stop to his killing spree and hopefully stop four more deaths. Things have obviously not gone according to his carefully crafted plan, and my guess is that he will be really rattled by that.’

  ‘You must have loads of work to do and I want to see how the Prof is getting on with the PM, so let’s make the most of the nearest thing we have had to a real breakthrough since these killings began.’

  They parted company and for the next hour Martin immersed himself in the post-mortem examination. The professor made every ounce of the dead man’s body talk, and when Martin left the laboratories to begin the three o’clock briefing it was with the knowledge that this time the Prof’s input into the meeting would be anything but surplus to requirements.

  PC Lyons had certainly done as requested, and when Martin walked into the incident room at 3 p.m. he was the last to arrive. There was a different atmosphere to the sessions following the previous two murders, as this time there was more for the officers to work on and Martin enhanced the mood.

  ‘First of all, my thanks to those of you who were involved in this morning’s session when we actually did come up with the Primrose Garden Centre as one of the possible locations for this murder. Unfortunately the killer beat us to it but what it does mean is that we are getting inside the mind of this evil bastard.

  ‘Professor Moore and Alex Griffiths will tell us more about what is likely to have happened, but first of all, Matt, I’d like you to tell us what y
ou have found out about the victim.’

  ‘Well, there has not been a formal identification yet, but a set of car keys was found in his pocket belonging to the Vauxhall Corsa in the car park of the garden centre. There was no form of identification found on the body or in the car, but the car’s registered to a Mr Arthur Taylor with an address in Danescourt, Llandaff.’

  ‘DC Cook-Watts and I have just come back from there, but unfortunately Mr Taylor moved away about three months ago. His former neighbour’s description of him fits our victim very well, as he does have some pretty distinguishing features. She describes him as being about my height and with very bushy eyebrows, but most significantly she describes two small fire-breathing dragon tattoos, one on each of his forearms.

  ‘The people who now live in his old address were at work but the neighbour we spoke to, a Mrs Jenkins, had obviously been quite friendly with Mr Taylor and his wife. So there is a wife, but apparently no children. Mrs Jenkins told us that she had been surprised at the couple’s decision to move and put it down to some nuisance calls they had been getting. They just told her they wanted to get away from Cardiff and she has no forwarding address. She doesn’t think the move is permanent because they haven’t sold their house, they’re just renting it on a month-by-month basis to the couple who are living there at the moment.

  ‘The woman also told us that Mr Taylor was ill and was getting treatment for something serious, probably cancer, but she wasn’t sure.’

  Helen added. ‘The neighbour told us that in spite of his health problems Mr Taylor always tried to be cheerful. He was a car dealer before he retired and he always joked that his wife had come to him to buy a car and left with more than she, or her boyfriend at the time, had bargained for.’

  Martin jumped on this sentence and moving to the boards on which the poems were written he underlined in red the lines ‘He stole away the one I loved, drove off without a thought.’

  He spoke quietly. ‘I can’t believe it’s going to be that easy. The victim was a car dealer. Mrs Taylor could originally have been the girlfriend of the killer but then met Mr Taylor, who drove her off in one of his cars leaving our killer with one hell of a grudge to harbour. So what are we saying – find Mrs Taylor, ask her who her boyfriend was when she met Mr Taylor, and de facto we have the killer? There is no way this twisted maniac is going to make it that simple for us.’

  Matt anticipated Martin’s next question. ‘Everyone outside this room is working on the job of finding Mrs Taylor, but the time it takes will depend on how keen the couple were to hide their tracks. I suspect it was the killer who made those phone calls that drove them away in the first place so they will not have wanted to be found – but obviously Mr Taylor was!’

  ‘Let’s take a look at the crime scene,’ said Martin, indicating to Alex that his input was needed next.

  Alex showed the general layout of the garden centre and then the specific area where the body was discovered sprawled amongst the dainty yellow flowers.

  ‘The most significant difference between this murder scene and the other two is the amount of blood we see here and the disturbance that has been caused.’ He pointed out a number of breakages and the flattening of some wooden trellis as clear signs of a struggle.

  ‘We were able to see immediately that there were many more than just the two stab wounds we have come to expect, but I know the Prof will want to tell us about those later so I won’t steal his thunder. The significant piece of evidence from my point of view is this partial shoe print that may eventually be helpful in securing a conviction but for now just tells us in which direction the killer left the building. There was nothing to show he had used the toilet that he must have passed on his way out and in any event a young girl has told us that he was still covered in blood when she saw him.’

  Matt interrupted. ‘Yes, and if the weather hadn’t changed this morning he would probably have been seen by a lot more people, talk about the luck of the devil.’

  Alex went on to explain that the yellow cord looked as if it had been tied in a hurry and was a granny knot instead of the expected reef knot. He was disappointed to report that as before the killer had left behind no fingerprints and must have taken a very blood-stained knife away with him. It certainly hadn’t been found at the garden centre.

  The professor was the next on his feet and this time he had a lot more to bring to the investigation and was in his element as the audience became more and more engrossed in his findings.

  He pointed to an abdominal wound. ‘This is the incision with which the killer would have been expecting to kill his victim. The knife has been thrust into the body in the same part of the anatomy as with the other two victims, and we could well have expected the same result, but let me tell you why we didn’t get it.

  ‘Compare the first two victims with this one. They were slightly built, and you’ll remember the sunshine of the past weeks when we were all wearing lightweight clothes. Today’s victim has a lot more adipose tissue and a great deal of it is deposited around his waist. Coupled with that, he was wearing a moderately heavy raincoat, and those two things made the journey of the knife through his body much less predictable.

  ‘With the killer not hitting his target immediately, the victim had a bit of an opportunity to fight back and it looks as if our man lost control.’

  The Prof showed seven other stab wounds on the body and this time there were two attempts at the neck. He added. ‘That’s where all this blood came from, because this time he did slash the carotid artery and in my opinion that would have been the fatal wound.

  ‘There is blood under the nails of the victim but underneath the blood there are tiny bits of black fibre. I believe that the blood will be the victim’s own and the fibres will be from the killer’s jacket so I don’t think he left any of his DNA behind, just minute particles of his sleeve.

  ‘Even if Mr Taylor had not been butchered in the way we see here, he would still not have been around to open his Christmas presents. He had advanced carcinoma of the pancreas and it looks as if he was receiving radiotherapy treatment. If he has a wife waiting for him to come home I suspect she will raise the alarm early. Even without the intervention of the killer she would have good reason to think her husband could have been found dead somewhere.’

  ‘Life’s a bitch,’ said Matt. ‘You mean to say that this poor sod was suffering from some incurable form of cancer, was driven out of his home, and ended up getting stabbed to death. From what we know it’s more than likely that the killer knew his victim had cancer – he needn’t have bothered killing Mr Taylor, he could have just let nature take her course.’

  ‘That would involve a certain degree of humanity,’ said Martin. ‘This killer wouldn’t know the meaning of that word. He wasn’t going to let Mr Taylor get away with stealing his girlfriend, and he was not going to let Mother Nature steal his opportunity to carry out a murder he has thought about for years. He’s the sick one!’

  Chapter Twelve

  Of unsound mind

  It was five hours since he had murdered Arthur Taylor, and if things had gone according to plan he would now be sitting in his rented accommodation and switching from channel to channel to get the best coverage of his handiwork. He couldn’t make up his mind if the actual killing was the best part of the process or watching the aftermath from the comfort of his armchair. Or maybe it was the years of planning and watching his identified victims from a distance as he worked out their part in his killing game.

  This time things hadn’t gone as he had anticipated because he had been surprised by the physical strength of his intended victim. He had known that Taylor was terminally ill and had read on the internet all about cancer of the pancreas and the relevant treatments. He’d expected the bastard, who had stolen his one and only love, to be weakened by the disease and the debilitating therapy.

  Arthur had always been a big man and was something of a fatty twenty-six years ago when he and Carol had first met. That was one
of the things the killer couldn’t understand. How could the woman he had been living with for three years possibly have preferred an overweight, brainless moron to someone who was, in his own eyes at least, a respected member of the community, and who kept himself in good shape.

  What really rankled then, and had over the years poured ever more poison into the killer’s mind, was the fact that he had been instrumental in their meeting. It was he who had suggested that Carol should upgrade her car for her birthday, and had sent her to look at models he had picked out for her in a dealership on Hadfield Road.

  He had loved Carol more than he had ever believed he was capable of doing but he knew that their relationship was on the rocks and that she was likely to leave. He saw the gift of a car, barely second-hand, as delaying the inevitable. Although he loved her there was little else in the world he even liked and he was by nature a ruthless man – or as Carol’s mother was known to call him, ‘a nasty piece of work’. He had done well in his chosen career and was used to getting his own way, and expected the same from his private life.

  There was no woman who had been put on this earth who was going to make a fool of him and get away with it, and Carol would soon know that she had been foolish to try. She would not even be afforded the bittersweet memories of having nursed her husband through the last days of their life together. She would soon be told that her beloved Arthur had been stabbed to death amongst the pansies and that would be a laughing point for anyone who had ever bought a defective used car from her second-hand husband.

  It was when he heard that Carol had actually married the moron and become Mrs Taylor that he had vowed to get his revenge, and now he had done just that. But unlike his first two murders this one had not left him with the sweet taste of success. He knew he had panicked when he forced his knife into Taylor’s body and it felt so different from the other two. It hadn’t hit the spot and instead of the life draining from Arthur’s eyes it was as if a light had been turned on.