by Ellis, Tim
After a short time, a thin pale woman, wearing a green pair of coveralls, green wellies, and a thick blue and white checked jacket, arrived.
‘Hello. I’m Clare Harper. How can I help?’
Xena wondered whether she should shake hands with the woman, but noticed that she had on a pair of dirty green rubber gloves. ‘We’d like to talk to Mr Romero or his son.’
‘You’re not going to waste taxpayer’s money on a holiday to Mexico, are you?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘That’s where they are – Mexico. If you want to talk to either of them, then that’s where you’ll have to go.’
‘When are they coming back?’
‘My understanding is that they left in 2005, and your guess is as good as mine about when they plan to return.’
Xena’s brow furrowed. ‘They do own this garden centre, don’t they?’
‘So I believe, but it’s in the hands of a management company called IRS Asset Management who are based in London. I manage the centre on a day-to-day basis, and a management consultant called Irene Robertson – who is a partner in IRS – oversees my management on behalf of the Romeros.’
‘And what happens to the money?’
‘Well, I suppose it goes on holiday to Mexico.’
Xena wasn’t in the mood for jokes, and she definitely wasn’t in the mood for smiling. ‘Have you got an address for Irene Robertson?’
‘I have a telephone number.’
‘I suppose that will do.’
‘I’ll go and get it.’
‘Follow her, Stick. Make sure she doesn’t slip out the back way.’
‘I hardly think… Oh, a joke.’
Xena stared at him. ‘Well?’
‘I thought…’ He made his way after Clare Harper.
She returned to the car, leaned back against the passenger door, and looked up at the darkening sky. So, the Romeros have been in Mexico since 2005. That meant their number one suspect had dropped off the list. In fact, there was no one from all the names they had who was in the frame for the whole thirteen years, and it was hardly likely that one of them would keep coming back to the house to bury bodies. They had to interview everybody, go through the motions, get a complete picture of events during that thirteen-year period, but it was looking as though they didn’t have the killer on their list of names at all.
Stick returned waving a scrap of paper. ‘I said thank you for their help.’
‘Good for you. You’ll make a good doorman one day.’
‘It looks like the Romeros are no longer our number one suspects.’
‘I’m a great believer in the mantra, “If you’ve got nothing useful to contribute, shut the fuck up”.’
‘Yes, I like that,’ Stick said and grinned. He looked at his watch. ‘It’s half past five. Are we working through the night, or calling it a day?’
‘I don’t know about you, but I think I’ve had enough for one day. Its not as if there’s a mad rush to solve this case, is there?’
Her phone rang.
‘Shit, I spoke too soon. DS Blake.’
‘We didn’t pull the conservatory down, but I had builders with jackhammers come and dig up the concrete foundations. Guess what we found?’
‘How many?’
‘Seven so far.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Exactly. The bodies weren’t in the concrete they were in the ground underneath. And all of them are young women.’
‘When you say, “In the ground underneath” – How deep did the concrete go down?’
‘It’s complicated. Apparently, the foundations under the conservatory are called deep strip foundations, and go down to a depth of three feet.’
‘That’s a fair way down.’
‘Except, the same depth is not used throughout. The deep strips are under the walls, and then criss-cross within those limits to form six-by-six foot squares. Inside these squares the depth of the concrete is about six inches.’
‘And where are the bodies located?’
‘Inside the squares.’
‘Jesus. There’s no way that could have happened by accident. The killer must have been burying bodies while the conservatory was being built.’
‘That’s what we think.’
‘Okay. Thanks, Di… I suppose. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She told Stick what Di Heffernan and her team had found.
‘Maybe we should go back to the station, put everything we’ve got so far on an incident board, do some brainstorming, and then call it a day?’
‘That’s the first thing you’ve said today that’s made any fucking sense at all. Do you like Chinese?’
‘Don’t mind.’
‘We’ll get one on the way back and eat it while we work. I’m that fucking hungry I could ravage a scabby donkey.’
‘It’d be like our first meal out together.’
‘See, I’m a bit nice to you, and all of a sudden you think you stand a chance with me. Let me make this as fucking plain as I can without being too unkind. There’s no way in hell I’ll ever fancy you. You’re the ugliest bloke it’s ever been my misfortune to work with, and if you come on to me again I’m going to grab hold of your testicles – assuming you have testicles that is – and I’m going to squeeze them until your eyeballs pop out. Is there anything in what I’ve said that you need me to explain to you in greater detail?’
‘No, I think I understand where you’re coming from.’
‘Excellent.’
‘What’s your favourite Chinese takeaway?’
‘I think I’m going to murder you before we’ve solved this case.’
‘Okay, Sarge.’
***
‘And you are?’
They were at the door in the basement to the IT room.
A woman with wide-rimmed glasses peered at his warrant card, and he wondered why IT people always looked like geeks.
‘Rebecca Dove, but people call me Becca.’
‘I’d like an email sent to every council employee.’
‘Is it legal?’
‘Would I be asking you to do something that’s illegal?’
‘I watch TV, listen to the news, read books. Coppers are the dirtiest people around – everyone knows that. Who polices the police is my answer?’
‘That’s a question. The answer is the Independent Police Commission.’
‘They’re all part of the conspiracy.’
‘We’re murder detectives,’ Richards chipped in. ‘We’re not like that.’
‘What proof have you got?’
‘Well…’
‘I thought so – guilty as charged.’
‘Listen,’ Parish said. ‘How about you just send the email and hope you never get on the wrong side of us? We’ve already fitted up four people and made two others disappear today.’
‘Yeah, why don’t I do that? And don’t think I don’t believe you. Many a true word has been said in jest. What do you want sent?’
Parish took the camera off Richards. ‘I want a photograph of a dead woman downloaded from this camera into the body of the email, and then sent to all employees with my contact number attached and the message to contact me if they know the woman, or saw her in the council building today.’
‘Okay, I can do that.’
‘Go with her, Richards, make sure she doesn’t sabotage our efforts. After you’ve done that, give Toadstone his camera back before you break it, and I’ll meet you at the car. Oh, and don’t dawdle.’
‘Male coppers are the worst, you know,’ Becca added before he left Richards to it. ‘The police force is a patriarchal institution.’
He took his time walking to the car. Now he had two murders to investigate. Usually, his other cases could be stacked on the backburner while he dealt with the high profile case. The murder of this woman – possibly his mother – however, made both cases not necessarily high profile, but definitely pressing. Richards was right though. If Kowalski got a sniff that the dead w
oman could be his long lost mother he’d take them both off the case.
‘Back to the station?’ Richards asked when she returned to the car.
‘Home.’
‘But you said…’
‘I’m worried about your mother.’
‘But you said…’
‘I lied.’
Chapter Seven
The table was covered in empty and half-empty silver foil cartons of rice, noodles, crispy roast pork with honey, sweet and sour chicken Hong Kong style, barbecued spare ribs, beef with ginger and spring onions, duck with pineapple, a bag of prawn crackers, and a bottle of soy sauce. As well as her usual, Xena had wanted to try a few new things. Stick had shrugged and paid.
Xena helped herself to two plates, cutlery and condiments from the kitchen, and they got stuck in.
Stick began constructing the incident board with what they knew, and taking mouthfuls of food in between. ‘We have five bodies under the patio, and another seven under the conservatory. Of the five bodies, one is a man, three are women, and the last one is an eighteen-year-old exchange student from Belarus called Petra Loyer who was studying at the University of Derby. We now know she went missing ten years ago, and the lead detective from the original investigation – DI Jeanette Carter from Buxton CID – is arriving tomorrow morning.’
‘Don’t remind me.’
‘The seven bodies under the conservatory are all young women, and they were either buried there before it was built, or during its construction.’
‘It was put up after 1999.’
Stick wrote the date on the board and stood back to admire his handiwork. ‘You know what?’
‘Surprise me.’
‘We need to dig all the grounds up.’
Xena smiled. ‘Of course we do. How do you do that, Stick?’
‘What?’
‘Have moments of genius without a brain.’
‘It’s a knack I have.’
‘Why the hell would the killer confine himself to that particular area? There could be bodies buried all over the place. We need a map of the house and its grounds.’
‘We’ll get one tomorrow,’ Stick said. ‘And then we can plot on it exactly where the bodies were found.’
‘Bollocks… We’ve got masses to do tomorrow.’ She shuffled about to find her phone and rang Diane Heffernan.
‘This better be good. I’m soaking in a red hot scented bath… and I was just dozing off.’
‘The thought will give me nightmares, and I hope it’s your bath? Anyway, I need a map of the house and grounds with details of the bodies you’ve found so far marked on it.’
‘I’m sure tomorrow will do?’
‘Oh yeah, but I thought I’d ring you before I forgot.’
‘Goodbye then.’
‘And…’
‘You’re not going to spoil my bath are you?’
‘…You’re going to have to dig up the whole place.’
‘Ha! I’m three steps ahead of you, DS Blake. I’ve got a piezoelectric receiver coming tomorrow. It’s like sonar – only for underground. It sends out an electric pulse and receives an echo back in return. The echoes join up to form a picture of what’s underground to a depth of three metres.’
‘Ingenious.’
‘It’s a long drawn out process, but then so is digging everything up.’
‘You’re still going to do some digging though, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, we’ll have to if we come across images we need to investigate more thoroughly.’
‘Have a good soak… I’m sure you deserve it.’
The phone went dead.
Stick carried on. ‘We have a number of suspects…’
‘Who aren’t really suspects?’
‘…But they’re all we’ve got, and the actual killer might be connected to them in some way.’ He wrote the list of names on the board and spoke at the same time. ‘Judge Margaret Boyd and her husband Luke owned the house between 1987 and 1999. We’ve interviewed them. You need to check your email for a list of the judge’s criminal cases, and then we need to cross-reference the bodies – once we find out who they are – with those cases.’
‘You’ll make someone a good fucking secretary one of these days.’
‘I like to be efficient. The Boyds also gave us the name of the gardener Ignacio Romero and his son, but we now know they’ve been in Mexico since 2005…’
‘Which obviously needs confirming.’
‘Of course. We also need to talk to the management consultant Irene Robertson from IRS Asset Management.’ He wrote the telephone number Clare Harper had given him under her name. ‘We still have the list of house owners to interview. Next were Mathew and Amanda Tucker. He was the Labour MP for Hobbs Cross during the period he owned the house, which was between 1999 – 2005. Then there was Mally Haynes, the lead singer with Buzz Pig, who lived in it between 2005 – 2008. Louise Marsden and Iwona Przygoda followed them between 2008 – 2011, and the Rushforths bought it in 2011.’
‘Digging up the grounds is really going to put her designer fucking face out of joint.’ As a smile spread across her face, Xena stretched her arms upwards, and then interlocked the fingers behind her head. 'I’d love to see the bitch's face when she finds out we’re going to do that. Maybe I’ll go and tell her personally first thing in the morning.’
‘Don’t forget…’
The smile disappeared as if it had never been. ‘I was enjoying the moment then, and you sucked it dry again. I haven’t forgotten DI Jeanette Carter. As far as I’m concerned she can fucking swivel. If we’re not here when she arrives, we’re not here. We’re far too busy to wait around for some bleeding heart provincial has-been detective who wants to get in my fucking way.’
‘Should I continue?’
‘Please fucking do.’
‘We know that Arvon Paving laid the patio in 2003. You know what?’
‘Not again?’
‘I don’t understand how the bodies weren’t discovered when they built the conservatory and laid the patio.’
‘Good point. The bodies were probably buried too deep…’
‘In which case, why was one of them right next to the surface for Mr Rushforth to find?’
‘Three genius moments in one night! You’d better lie down before your peanut of a brain explodes.’
‘Although, I have heard of bodies escaping from their coffins and rising to the surface due to subsidence, minor earthquakes, or…’
‘Earthquakes! When was the last fucking earthquake recorded in Essex?’
‘Well…’
‘Yeah, fucking never… that’s when. That was a peanut brain moment, Stick.’
‘Anyway, the timeframe of our killer is 1997 to 2010 – thirteen years so far. It might be that some of the bodies under the conservatory were put there before 1997.’
‘It’s a possibility. We need to speak to Doc Paine again.’
‘The point I was about to make was that none of the people we have listed on the board had access to the house and its grounds for the whole of the thirteen-year period.’ Stick drew a line across the top of the board, which he dated from 1997 to 2012. He then slotted each suspect into the timeline. ‘We don’t know whether the Romeros were responsible for the gardening until they left the country in 2005, but they could have had the longest access to the grounds, which would have covered the period the conservatory was built and the patio was laid.’
Xena shook her head. ‘But if they left the country in 2005, then they weren’t here to bury the later bodies between leaving and 2010.’
Stick picked up a red marker pen and drew a large red question mark in the middle of the timeline. ‘Which can only mean that we haven’t identified the killer yet.’
‘Oh, very artistic.’
‘I know you’re not relishing the idea of this DI Carter coming here…’
‘That’s a fucking understatement. She’s going to come in and start taking over…’
‘The Chief won
’t let her do that…’
‘The Chief’s away for two days. I’m a DS and she’s a DI…’
‘There’s DI Parish…’
‘He’s got his own case.’
‘Well, maybe she can help us. I mean, it’s our case, our patch, and…’
‘You’re too fucking naïve, Stick. She’ll march in, trample over both of us, and take over the investigation. We’ll be her bitches… especially you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘What else have we got?’
‘Questions.’
‘We’ve got lots of those.’
‘Why did the killing stop… or at least there’s no more buried bodies after 2010?’
Xena swung her feet up on the table and rocked back on her chair. ‘That we know of. There might be more recent bodies somewhere else in the grounds. Also, the killer might still be killing, but burying the bodies somewhere else.’
‘You can have genius moments as well.’
‘That’s not a line is it? You’re not trying to flatter me into fucking bed, are you?’
Stick showed his discoloured teeth. ‘I wouldn’t…’
‘Oh yes you would. Well, just remember what I said about staying on your side of the fence.’
‘I’ll remember. There’s also the possibility that there might be more than one killer.’
‘Another peanut brain moment. You think they’re passing the baton like relay runners?’
‘It’s just an idea.’
‘You don’t want to voice ideas like that, it makes you appear more stupid than you already are.’
‘Well, that’s it really. We could do with not going anywhere first thing in the morning.’
‘You think we’re going to wait around for Carter, and then waste more valuable time handing over my fucking case to her? Not a fucking chance in hell.’
‘We have a number of things to do…’
‘You can do them between eight thirty and nine, and then we’re out of here.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘You’ll succeed.’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘Right, you clean up this fucking mess, and I’ll see you at eight thirty in the morning. And I mean it… at nine we’re history.’