A Killing Karma

by Geraldine Evans

  ‘You might remember that two of the great unwashed are my parents, ThomCatt.’

  ‘Yeah. Right. Sorry.’

  ‘And to answer your question, all I found out was that Kris Callender's contact who supplied the hydroponic equipment for the cannabis in the loft was a Vietnamese — no name or other details, of course.’

  ‘Bugger. That widens the scope of the investigation. Wonder why they didn't confide that little titbit to the Lincolnshire cops? My contact made no mention of it.’

  ‘Probably didn't want to end up like Callender.’

  ‘Still, it might provide your friends and parents with a get-out clause. Ruthless lot, Orientals. They'd kill Callender without a qualm if it suited them.’

  ‘Doesn't explain DaisyMay's death. I can't see it as likely that she was meeting with foreign gangsters. She rarely left the smallholding according to the others, and if the contact visited the farm someone else would probably have mentioned it to me by now, even if only to get me off their backs. Still, it's another lead. There can't be that many Orientals living in the Fens.’

  'I wouldn't bet on it, said Catt. ‘I've just been reading the cops' comic—' This was what Catt called the Police Review, the official organ of the police force — ‘and there's more about than you'd think. And a number of them have set up these drug places. It's big business. Vietnamese criminals are responsible for any number of illicit cannabis factories.’

  Casey nodded. He had read the same report. Operation Atone, a national initiative which targeted the money men behind the rise in drug crime, had already found many cannabis factories, including one that was run on such a massive scale that the criminals responsible must rake in a million pounds a year.

  ‘According to what I read,’ Catt went on, ‘they can get up to four crops a year if they use the most efficient growing technique. Sounds a nice little earner and then some. Certainly worth killing for. Especially if the Vietnamese found out that Callender was cheating on them.’

  ‘Don't depress me,’ Casey said. ‘Getting a lead into this particular Vietnamese drug gang seems a challenge too far.’

  ‘Got to be done though,’ remarked the irrepressible Catt. ‘Want me to pass the info about the Vietnamese on to the Boston force?’

  Casey was unsure; he felt he would be breaking Moon's confidence. And what if he gave Catt the OK and Moon and Star bore any reprisals? But, in the end, he decided he had no choice as he couldn't rely on Moon or one of the others giving their Lincolnshire opposite numbers the information, so he gave Catt permission. Better the Lincolnshire force knew that Vietnamese criminals were responsible for financing the factory than let Moon, Star and the rest take all of the blame. Besides, hopefully the commune murders would be solved without involving any Oriental gentlemen long before the Lincolnshire force could succeed in infil-trating an undercover cop into the Vietnamese community.

  The next day, they had a breakthrough in the official investigation. It seemed Caitlin Osborne, Gus Oliver's illegitimate daughter, had confessed to killing her father. Although they'd had no luck in finding her, she had come into the police station voluntarily from wherever she'd been living after she had left the Liverpool home of her adoptive parents and had bluntly told all to the duty sergeant. And when Casey and Catt went along to the interview room to question her she didn't retract her confession of guilt.

  Caitlin Osborne looked much as he'd expected. Living rough wasn't the best beauty regime. She had a strong look of her father around the eyes and, like him, her lips were the full and sensual type that hinted that their owner was more than ready to indulge the vices. From the look of her, she'd indulged her love of drugs to the full.

  Casey leaned back on the hard chair in the windowless interview room and stared across the scarred table at Caitlin Osborne. She looked grubby and unkempt, which was to be expected if she'd been living on the streets or in some derelict building. ‘Okay. You said you killed your father. So what time was this?’ he asked her. ‘And how did you get him into that alleyway? We know his body was moved after death.’

  The last question seemed to give her problems because she was silent for several seconds, then she said, as if suddenly inspired, 'I don't know exactly what time it was as I've pawned my watch. But it was getting towards dusk. I'd been waiting for him in the shadows behind a large shrub and I killed him as he came out of the house. He was startled and I was able to take him by surprise before he was able to react. No one could see me as the house is quite private and the hedges surrounding the house screens it well. The side gate was unlocked. I hid him in the garden shed for a couple of days — I needed the time to get up my nerve to move him. There was no wood or coal stored there so I didn't think his wife would go in there. I used his own wheelbarrow to move him early on Monday morning; it was just sitting there on the back path. I had the knife because I've been living on the streets in the town and I needed it to protect myself.’

  ‘Did you see Mrs Oliver at all?’

  ‘Before he came out and while I was waiting, I could see her in the downstairs room. She was reading.’

  'I see. What did you do all over the weekend? Wait in the shed with the body?’

  She nodded again, but said nothing more.

  'A bit spooky, wasn't it?’

  ‘It was dry and private. Better than the streets. And I've slept in worse.’

  ‘How were you sure he was dead?’

  'I just was, all right? He didn't move. He just lay there as unresponsive in death as he'd been in life.’ She gave them a twisted smile as she said, 'I remember thinking that it was the longest time I'd spent with him in my whole life.’

  ‘So what did you do with the knife?’ Catt put in.

  For a moment, she looked anxious as if scared her story was unravelling. Then she said, 'I lost it somewhere. I bought some smack after I dumped his body in the alley and the rest of the night's a blur.’

  So far, it sounded plausible enough. If it wasn't for the fact that Caitlin was skin and bone. She looked half-starved and probably was. Her face was pasty with deep shadows under her eyes. Her lank hair was unwashed and uncombed. Altogether, she looked a wreck, incapable of either moving a man's dead body or formulating any kind of plan.

  But then again, the outline of her murderous attack hadn't called for any great planning; merely the luck not to be seen. Though the strength required to shift Oliver looked to be lacking, which was a weak point on which Casey tackled her.

  ‘Did you have help to move him?’ Oliver hadn't been a heavy man, but he would have been a dead weight. Surely she hadn't been able to shift him along to the alley on her own?

  But she insisted that was just what she had done. ‘He deserved to die. I'm not sorry I killed him. I'm glad he's dead. He treated me like dirt. Ignored me all my life.’

  Casey felt sorry for the girl. He could sympathise with her rampant self-pity. She was still very young, her father’s rejection of her clearly still very raw. But was this claim to have killed the father who had rejected her just a drug-fuelled fantasy, one enacted in Caitlin's mind over and over again until she had come to believe in its veracity? Or was she telling the truth? They had enough for now to hold her so she wouldn't disappear like the runaway commune pair. Meanwhile, they would see if Alice Oliver or any of her neighbours had noticed Caitlin hanging around the house.

  After cautioning her and suggesting she avail herself of the services of the duty solicitor, Casey left the room, followed by Catt, and gestured to the uniformed officer waiting outside the door that she was to be taken to the cells.

  ‘Think she did it?’ Catt asked.

  ‘As to that, God knows. She doesn't look as if she could lift a kitten, never mind a grown man. Moving him to the alley and tipping him out of the wheelbarrow wouldn't be easy.’

  ‘Maybe hate gave her the required strength.’

  ‘Maybe so. She certainly seems to have been nursing plenty of it.’

  Catt, the abandoned product of a number of c
hildren's homes, remarked, ‘Can't blame her for that. Her father must have been more of a bastard than she is to ignore her as he did. I'm surprised she persisted in trying to see him and gain his acknowledgement.’

  ‘She seems the obsessive type. And then she's had treatment for paranoia, according to Alice Oliver. Who's to say what action her tormented mind might order up? Perhaps living rough on the streets, as she has for the past few weeks, concentrated her mind. Anyway, hopefully one of the Olivers' neighbours will be able to enlighten us if she was loitering with intent.’

  The Olivers' neighbours proved not to have noticed a loitering Caitlin. Neither had Alice Oliver when Casey and Catt questioned her. But if she'd been in the drawing room with the lights on she would have been able to see little outside and the double glazing would have muffled all but the loudest noise.

  It was another possibility with nothing to prove it either way. Even if Caitlin Osborne was guilty, Casey felt it unlikely she would have to face a charge of murder. As with Moon and Star, her brief would doubtless try to persuade her to plead diminished responsibility, especially given her medical history.

  What now? Casey wondered as he settled down to yet more reports. Surely they must get a breakthrough in both cases soon? In this, he was lucky — in the commune murder investigation at least. For the runaway pair of Scott Johnson and Randy Matthews had been found and were singing like caged canaries according to Catt when he sauntered in.

  ‘So what have they said?’ Casey questioned as Catt sat down.

  ‘That Dylan and DaisyMay weren't quite the love's young dream we've been led to believe.’

  'Oh?'

  ‘No. Johnson and Matthews were in the next bedroom, they said, and often heard the pair rowing.’

  ‘What about? Did they hear?’

  ‘No. All they heard was voices shouting, but not the words. Still, it's a pointer that Dylan might not be as grief-stricken as we've been led to believe. Maybe he discovered that DaisyMay had been meeting Callender for afternoon drinkies and had concluded that the drinks had led to something more, as drink so often does.’

  ‘Maybe so. Perhaps it's time I pulled him out of his bedroom again and asked him a few more questions. Probably should have pressed him harder when I spoke to him last time,’ Casey acknowledged.

  ‘Better late than never.’

  Reluctantly, Casey said, ‘I’ll drive up there this evening.’ He hoped that evening's questioning brought some answers worthy of the round trip because he was heartily tired of the journey.

  Dylan Harper, when, for the second time, he was winkled from his bedroom, proved even more sullen and uncooperative than the last time he’d been questioned.

  ‘You do want your girlfriend's killer caught?’ Casey asked. This only brought a glowering response.

  ‘Only that's not the impression you're giving. You and Ms Smith had a number of rows before her death, I understand?’

  This got his attention. ‘Who told you that?,’ he sharply demanded.

  ‘That's not important. But I notice you don't deny it.’

  ‘It was a hard time for both of us. DaisyMay had a difficult pregnancy. She threw up morning, noon and night and often couldn't sleep and that woke me up. The lack of sleep made both of us irritable, inclined to snap at the least little thing.’

  ‘And that's all the rows were about?’

  That's all,’ Dylan insisted.

  ‘Not because DaisyMay had been out drinking with Kris Callender?’

  Dylan made no response to this.

  ‘She was seen, you understand. They looked very friendly.’

  ‘Why wouldn't they?’ Dylan snapped. ‘There were friends, man. We were all friends.’

  ‘But not any more?’

  ‘How can I be friends with any of them until I learn which of them killed her?’

  Dylan's response was entirely natural. So why did Casey think the man wasn't telling him the entire truth?

  Chapter Sixteen

  If Casey found it hard to believe in Caitlin Osborne's confession of guilt over her father's murder, he found it even harder to believe in the innocence of several of the other suspects in the case. Fallon, in particular, given his tendency to violence, headed the suspect list.

  But, unless something moved on the investigation, he was stumped as to how he would prove Fallon, or any of them, a murderer. And although they now had the CCTV footage as well as the neighbour's statement, Fallon had still denied he'd had anything to do with Oliver's death. Without forensics to link him to the killing, it was stalemate.

  He and Catt had also closely questioned each of the other suspects, again with the same result as before: lots of protestations of innocence mostly, plus the odd burst of temper. Even the polite and reserved Alice Oliver seemed to be losing her cool. Apart from Mrs Oliver, they had all followed the example set by Fallon and equipped themselves with a solicitor who would fend off any more unwanted questions.

  But at least things were moving in their shadow investigation. It was Catt's contact in the Lincolnshire force who provided them with the breakthrough.

  The DNA results were in, as Catt revealed the next morning. ‘Turns out Kris Callender was going to be a daddy twice over. He not only fathered young Madonna Redfern's child, he also fathered DaisyMay's.’'

  ‘That still begs the question of whether Dylan knew.’ Casey paused. ‘Wait a minute. Dylan told me he had had mumps as a child — which would explain why he took such a relaxed attitude to the disease when the boy, Billy, brought it home. But what if he lied? What if he'd caught the disease when he was a grown man and it made him infertile?’

  ‘Then he'd have known for sure that DaisyMay had cheated on him,’ Catt finished. ‘Just like Max Fallon when he caught the clap.’

  ‘Exactly. Better check out Dylan Harper's medical records. Find out if he had mumps as a boy or later.’

  ‘I’m on to it,’ Catt told him as he made for the door.

  The line of inquiry into their newly-elegant tramp theory on the official murder investigation came to nothing, in spite of a smelly parade of men of the road being hauled into the station and questioned. They had the same result on finding the murder weapon. But on their unofficial investigation, Catt had found out that Dylan Harper had lied about one thing at least — his claim that he had had mumps as a boy. He hadn't: he had contracted the disease as an adult.

  Casey had been right in his guess. But now he decided to err on the side of caution. 'I suppose it's possible he might have thought the doctors had made a mistake and he wasn't infertile at all.’

  ‘That's one view,’ said Catt. ‘On the other hand, maybe he didn't doubt the doctor's diagnosis. Maybe he just went along with the idea that the baby was his for his own purposes. You said he and DaisyMay had been an item for two years?’

  Casey nodded.

  ‘He caught mumps some months before he met DaisyMay,’ Catt told him. ‘What do you bet he didn't tell DaisyMay that he couldn't give her babies?’

  ‘I told you, ThomCatt — I don't bet. But even if I did, that's one bet I certainly wouldn't take you up on. Dylan must have known as soon as she told him she was pregnant that she'd been unfaithful. I think he must have planned to kill her all along. Why else would he have spoilt her in that unlikely fashion throughout her pregnancy, but to make himself look the eager soon-to-be dad? Moon told me he doted on her during the weeks of her pregnancy. That he would hardly let her do a thing. Strange behaviour from a man who must have known she'd been cheating on him.’

  ‘Covering the tracks he intended to make. A gypsy's revenge. Crafty.’

  ‘But not crafty enough. Did you tell your Lincolnshire policeman about our discovery?’

  ‘You bet. Or not.’ Catt rubbed his hands. 'I think we can expect an arrest very shortly. Don't you?’

  Casey nodded. ‘Let's just hope we have a similar result soon in our own investigation,’ Casey put in before Catt became too gung-ho.

  Catt's face fell. ‘I'd almo
st forgotten about that in all the excitement,’ he revealed.

  'I hadn't. But I've had an idea about that.’

  'Oh yes? Tell all, O wise one.’

  Casey tapped his nose. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I've one or two things I've got to find out first. But when — if — I do, you'll be the first to know.’

  Catt pulled a face, but had to be satisfied with that.

  Catt's mobile rang just as he entered Casey's office. He whisked it out of his pocket and glanced at the display. ‘It's my force contact up in Boston,’ he said before he took the call.

  Casey listened to one half of the conversation with growing frustration.

  'Yeah,' said Catt. 'I see. Has he said anything else?’ He listened some more, then asked, ‘What about the rest of them?’

  Casey's frustration was growing by the second. His fingers drummed on the top of his desk and he made wind it up gestures at Catt.

  Finally, Catt said, 'I see,’ once more, thanked his caller and snapped the mobile shut. ‘The Lincolnshire cops have arrested Dylan Harper.’

  Casey stared at him. ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing,’ Catt said as he sat down. ‘He's not talking. According to my source they've barely got a word out of him since they took him in.’

  Casey nodded. ‘I'm not surprised. He's not exactly the most chatty individual. So what have they got on him?’

  ‘Apart from the DNA evidence that proves he's not the father of DaisyMay's baby and that he and the dead woman rowed a lot before she died? Nothing.’

  ‘So if he keeps quiet they'll shortly have to let him go.’

  ‘That's about the size of it.’

  ‘What about the arguments Scott and Randy said Dylan had had with DaisyMay? He's not said anything more than that they were caused by irritability brought on by lack of sleep?’

  ‘No. He's sticking to that .He won't admit he was aware that Daisy's baby wasn't his.’

  ‘Damn.’ Casey thought for a moment, then he asked, ‘The police have all left the commune?’