by J. S. Law
They were both silent for a long time.
“I can’t tell you much more, Danny, because I don’t know much more.”
“Why post the fingers at all?” asked Dan, maybe to herself.
“I don’t know, maybe something is coming up that’s triggered it. An anniversary, or some other significant date? Maybe he—”
“Or she,” interrupted Dan.
“Or she,” agreed Felicity. “Maybe they hate that Hamilton gets the glory and they’re unknown, unhunted, unnoticed. Who knows what might trigger someone to do something like this?”
Dan nodded but didn’t speak for a few moments. Then she wondered aloud, “Why not just tell the military that there’s a Hamilton link? Then they’d have to release me.”
“I don’t think we’re prepared to do that at the moment,” said Felicity, letting the words hang as they both considered the breach of trust that went with Hamilton’s appointment to the investigation to hunt himself down.
Felicity reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper with a list of dates. She handed it to Dan.
“We’ve formally identified some and put our best thoughts against the others, but we’d be willing to hear other theories if you’d take a look.”
Dan took the piece of paper.
“I appreciate you and Trish trusting me with this,” Dan said, trying to be calm, though her mind was whirling as she thought about all she’d heard. “I’m going to take a quick shower. You still want to eat out?”
“At the moment, I’m not sure I could eat at all,” said Felicity. “But we should try. Go get ready. When you’re done, we do need to talk a bit more.”
4
Thursday, January 29
Dan closed her bedroom door and sat down on the bed.
The shopping list of dates, the name of a dead woman marked against most of them, was hanging loosely between her fingers.
She looked at the piece of paper again, examined the dates, and lowered herself onto the bedroom floor, turning slightly so that she could reach under the bed and pull out the lockbox where she kept her notes from the Hamilton investigation.
It took her a moment to notice that her hands were shaking.
Memories of Hamilton were jostling to the front of her mind. The image of the bodies she’d found in his garage, the snapshot that regularly visited in her dreams, seemed now sharper with hindsight, her mind having filled in gaps and enhanced the detail, until all that she knew of their injuries and the horror of their deaths was in high definition, a perfectly presented study of torture and death.
Her breathing deepened and then quickened, and she placed a hand to her chest as she remembered fighting with him in his garage, remembered his eyes, his smile, the strength of his hands, the sound his blood made as it seeped across the floor and soaked into the dry concrete.
Dan looked away from the lockbox, tipped her head back against the bed, and blew out a long breath through rounded lips. She ran her hand through her hair, closed her eyes tight, and then pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to squeeze the memories away.
Then she remembered the parking lot, a year after Hamilton had been jailed for life. She remembered the men who had been waiting there for her, their ruthless attack. As she did, the scars on her back, long since faded but never fully gone, seemed to burn behind her, painful again, the agony fading only as she clenched her teeth and counted slowly to ten.
The hunt for Hamilton had been one of the longest and most uncertain manhunts in British criminal history, and Dan had ended it when she’d found three women stacked like firewood, their bodies broken and their skin mottled, underneath a tarpaulin in the corner of Christopher Hamilton’s garage.
But even though he was now locked away, there was so much that she didn’t know.
He’d been convicted of the murders of the three women, but he was widely considered to be the most prolific nonmedical serial killer in British history. The number of possible victims reckoned to have suffered and died by Hamilton’s hand over his relentless thirty-year massacre reached over one hundred, with some estimates at double that, but what confounded police, and Dan, to this day was the absence of his victims’ bodies.
Dan knew that everywhere Hamilton had ever lived, or spent any serious amount of time, had been searched, X-rayed, and excavated, but with no trace as to where the bodies of his other victims might be.
Theories raged that he carried his victims’ bodies on board naval warships and disposed of them at sea, though Dan knew that the risks associated with this undertaking would have been simply too high. Also, she knew that there were periods of years when he wouldn’t have had access to seagoing vessels, and so this theory was ruled out.
Dan had never come up with a satisfactory answer to this question. Where does a killer hide so many bodies so well that they are never found?
She’d assumed the location of these murdered women would be something Hamilton would take to hell with him, or that one day someone would discover a collection of bones while walking on a moor somewhere, and the mystery, or some part of it, would be solved, the families allowed some modicum of peace and closure.
But what Felicity had just told Dan changed everything.
That someone was now sending well-preserved body parts to the police, that the body parts were arriving on the date of the victim’s disappearance, that each of these victims was firmly believed to have been abducted and murdered by Christopher Hamilton—all of these things made Dan’s head spin.
Dan rested her head forward in her hands and opened her eyes, looking down now at the lockbox.
Could there have been a completely separate, unconnected killer all along? A second killer working in parallel with Hamilton?
The thought seemed unlikely.
Flashing light caught Dan’s eye, and she heard her phone vibrating. She ignored it at first, then fumbled around on the bed until she found it and looked to see who it was.
She paused and took a moment to settle herself.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, leaning back against the bed and letting her head rest against the mattress.
“I was just thinking about you and thought I’d check in,” he said. “Are you okay? You sound tired.”
Dan couldn’t help but smile.
“I’m okay, but I am a little tired. I can’t really talk at the moment, though; I’m in the middle of something.”
There was silence at the end of the line.
Her dad, who was so loud and gregarious in person, was crap on the phone. He hated using it, much preferred the face-to-face approach, and could never seem to settle into being himself on a call.
“I was thinking I might come down south for a few days next month,” he said. “I don’t have to stay with you, happy to get a hotel nearby, thought I might go for a beer with Roger and catch up with some old friends.”
Dan closed her eyes and sighed.
“You know you can stay here,” she said.
“Are you sure? I could fix some things for you while I’m there. That shower needs replacing, and the extractor wasn’t working properly, either. I could get those sorted out, and I bet the garden’s looking grim. I’d tidy that up for you, too.”
Dan noticed how much more easily he talked when it was about functional things, things that needed to be done, problems that needed to be solved.
“That’d be great, Dad. Thanks.”
He paused again.
“Okay, well, I’ll get Mim to text you the details and I’ll let you get on.”
“That’s great,” said Dan.
“Love you,” he said.
“I love you, too. Tell Mim I said her, too.”
She ended the call and dropped the phone on the floor beside her. She wondered how it must seem to someone like her dad, who loved her, there was no doubt about that, but who didn’t really know what was wrong with her.
He knew that the events on Tenacity had taken something from her, knew that something else had chang
ed in her before that, but in the absence of someone to confront, an enemy to fight on her behalf, he simply didn’t know what to do.
Dan knew that there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her, but he was completely unequipped to deal with what had happened, so much so that she could never tell him all of it, because the weight of it, the weight of knowing and not being able to fix what she’d been through, would destroy him, as surely as it was slowly destroying Dan.
She pulled the lockbox toward her and set the combination to open it. She steeled herself for the first picture, the one she always kept on top, but she managed to set it aside without lingering on it; there was no time for self-flagellation now.
The other files and papers were there, her notes and the laptop that she kept solely for her research into Hamilton’s relentless slaughter.
She reached for the small laptop and stopped. She didn’t need it. She recognized all of the dates on the piece of paper, and she recognized the names that would go with them, too. She could have recited each of them from memory.
Felicity knew this.
Dan leaned back against her bed and looked at the picture of her family on her bedside table.
Felicity and the National Crime Agency didn’t need help with theories or identification. Felicity wouldn’t be in any doubt at all about who these women were or who had been abducted on which date. Nor would she have any doubt that Hamilton was responsible for their disappearance.
No, Felicity needed something else, something that she hadn’t been able to ask for, something that she’d needed to let Dan work round to. She wanted Dan to go and face him again, she wanted Dan to meet with Hamilton.
5
Monday, February 2
“Boss.”
Granger caught up with her, slowing from a jog to a walk as he saw she’d stopped.
His nose was swollen and out of line, and the bruising around his eyes was a deep purple.
“What’s up, Chi Chi?” she said, turning to face him properly.
“Cute, but my kids are saying I’m more raccoon than giant panda,” he said, smiling, though between the swelling and the dark bruises, he looked a bit more like a bulldog snarling.
“They’re being sensitive to your feelings,” Dan assured him.
“They’re teenagers, so I genuinely doubt that. Anyway, we’ve got a call. MISPER on Defiance. Young Stores Assistant. She checked in for work on Friday, was seen by the armed sentry and the quartermaster, and was pegged in on the ship’s name board all day.”
As he said this, he motioned with his right hand, as though inserting one of the small plastic pegs into a hole on the wooden peg boards that were used by ships to show whether sailors were on board.
“No one saw her leave. Her line manager assumed she’d gone weekenders early, though no one saw her at the weekend, either, and so she’s just been reported missing now, after the Monday musters.”
Dan frowned. “They just assumed she’d gone on leave? That’s poor,” she said.
“It is. Her divisional officer knew about it, too. The commanding officer’s kicking ass and taking names as we speak. They did a thimble hunt on board today, but she’s been gone three days, so they weren’t likely to find anything. They’ve contacted her family, who made it clear they couldn’t care less where she is, so Defiance is confident she isn’t at home. The duty watch spoke to as many of the ship’s company as they could; no one’s seen her, no one knows anything about this.”
“Okay,” said Dan. “And they’re bouncing it straight here?”
He nodded.
“Defiance knows full well that sailors do this all the time and that they usually turn up after a few days. They take their punishment on the chin and move on. But her former fiancé, a civvie lad who moved down here with her after she joined the mob, well, he’s been calling the ship saying he’s not happy. Apparently, he was getting blocked all the way up the chain, until he finally got hold of the commanding officer. The ex, Jason, says she still talks to him a bit, even though they split a while back. He says she wouldn’t just run and says she’s got nowhere to run to if she did. The ship thinks she was happy, no problems; he says different. He turned up at the gate this afternoon asking to see you.”
John smiled again at that, just as Dan sighed.
“Am I the only name that comes up when you search ‘navy police’ on Google?” asked Dan.
“You’re the poster girl for the branch,” he said cheerfully, “your exposure to the Great British public knows no bounds, nice picture in last week’s paper. I have to say, though”—he gestured at the marks on her face—“you look a bit more like a poster girl for a cage fighting franchise at the moment, to be honest.”
“Where’s Jason now?”
“I sent him off home,” said John. “The investigation’s just been passed on to us. I said that once the famous Danielle ‘Drew’ Lewis had cast her eye over it and solved the whole thing, she’d give him a ring back. I said you were a busy woman but it wouldn’t take you long.”
Dan rolled her eyes and then looked sternly at John.
“Actually, I’m double sorry,” he said. “You’re way more Salander than Drew.”
“Stop pretending you can read books, Master at Arms,” said Dan, grinning at him as she walked into her office.
He followed.
Dan dropped her stuff onto her desk.
“So break it down for me,” she said, grabbing a half-full bottle of water and taking a drink. She looked down at the papers on the desk; the corner of a note she’d been reading poked out the top, Ryan Taylor’s name now visible, if John were to look.
Dan’s eyes were drawn to it.
“You listening, Boss?” asked John.
“Sorry. I am. Go from the top again. I get that she’s been gone the weekend and that her former fiancé is worried, but—and I mean this nicely—if she’s shacked up with a colleague somewhere, then he’s not likely to know where she is, is he? She might have dumped him, or gone elsewhere to get away from him.”
“True, but he called the civvie police, too.”
“They refer it to us?” asked Dan.
John shook his head.
“She was last seen at ten thirty on Friday just gone, the thirtieth. She’d had a meeting with her divisional officer but then missed a meeting with her line manager after that. They weren’t too worried, lots going on and she’d jobs inboard she could’ve been getting on with. Then she missed the muster after lunch. She never met with any friends for lunch. No one knows where she is or even where she might’ve gone. With it being a Friday, and with things slowing right down in the afternoon, her line manager, the section petty officer, decided that there might have been a miscommunication between him and her divisional officer, and he assumed she’d gone off on early weekend. He called her mobile, got no answer, but it was he who raised the alarm this morning when she didn’t show up.”
Dan looked at her watch, it was gone four o’clock. The ship’s company of Defiance would shortly be leaving at the end of the working day, making it pointless to go down, as there’d be next to no one there to speak to.
“Is she a junior?” Dan asked, needing to know if the missing girl was under eighteen years old, which would mean a different duty-of-care requirement and an escalation in the response.
He was shaking his head.
“She turned eighteen a few months ago, not long after she left basic training in Raleigh.”
Dan looked at her watch and said, “Just wish we’d got it earlier. There’ll be no one down there to talk to at this time.”
She sighed and looked back down at the notes she’d been reading through before John called on her.
“Are we sure she’s not just run home? You said the parents didn’t seem to care, but they wouldn’t be the first ones to cover for their kid.”
Again, John was shaking his head.
“I don’t think so, and the ex really doesn’t, either. Apparently, the stepfather was dead set agains
t her joining up in the first place. Because she was seventeen at the time and needed a parental signature, she pressured her mum to sign the forms behind his back. Jason’s opinion was clear; she wouldn’t go back there under any circumstance, and the stepdad wouldn’t have her in the house anyway. I got the impression her upbringing wasn’t reminiscent of the Waltons’, if you catch my meaning.”
“All this from the former fiancé, who’d be a central suspect if this escalated into a full missing persons search.”
John shrugged and then nodded.
“Anything to indicate she’s come to harm? Anyone think she might want to harm herself?” asked Dan.
John reached up to scratch his face, moving his hand delicately, wincing as his finger touched his bruised skin.
He’d never mentioned it, not once. Never even joked about it being her fault or anything like that, but Dan would be a liar if she didn’t admit to thinking it’d been her responsibility, her decision that had put him in harm’s way.
Ever since last Thursday’s meeting in London with Harrow-Brown, she’d continually replayed what’d happened at the small, disused industrial park on the edge of the New Forest. She’d worked back through it, each decision, trying to see which one had been the wrong one. Whether it’d been the initial decision to go out there once she’d found the address, the decision to take a look once she’d seen the car, or the decision to go into the shop and try to get Evelyn out. Each and every time she looked, that decision, the last one, the one that took her inside the shop and ultimately put John into conflict with Simmons, that decision seemed the soundest of them all.
“You drifted off again?” John was saying.